


The Fourth Mission: Don't Ever Tell Leia What To Do

by angel_deux



Series: Won't You Let Us Wander [8]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Angst, Emotional Manipulation, F/M, Fix-It, Gaslighting, Minor Chirrut Îmwe/Baze Malbus, the continued misadventures of Rogue One
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-19
Updated: 2017-02-24
Packaged: 2018-09-25 16:38:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 25,417
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9829958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/angel_deux/pseuds/angel_deux
Summary: It has been a month since the Rogue One crew has heard from Jyn, and Cassian isn't dealing with it very well.





	1. Don't Trust Draven

Cassian hates Hoth.

Of course, as K-2SO so snidely pointed out several days ago, Cassian hates a lot of things lately.

Even the _droid_ is making comments like that. Cassian has to admit that, despite his best efforts, he’s being obvious.

But everyone treating him like a powder keg only makes it worse. They forget that Cassian has spent most of his life hiding his emotions. Most of his life pretending not to be a wound-up mess of tension and bitterness. And now they’re acting like it’s a problem that he’s behaving the same way he always has.

And it’s cold, too. That’s the worst part.

No, the worst part was getting back to Hoth, to Alpha, finding evidence of her in every corner. Clothes she left behind. Datapads with notes on how to keep the place running. The engineers and scientists, still working, who asked after her with confusion when they saw she wasn’t with the rest of the team. Good-natured, confused.

Allar was the worst of them, because he just asked so many _questions_. Seemed so earnestly baffled. Kept mentioning what a surprise it was, as if Cassian didn’t know that, as if Cassian wasn’t still reeling.

“The way she tore out of here, going after you. I thought for sure…” and a shake of the head, a murmured, “I just don’t understand it.”

Then again, it was hard to blame him. Cassian’s primary outward reaction is tightly controlled anger, as always. Nothing of his own hurt, his own lack of answers.

The _worst_ part is that he still has no idea what happened to drive her away, and he can only imagine, can only guess, can only think about it far too much.

All this while everyone around him waits for him to lose control of himself.

_It’s been almost a month_ , he wants to say. _I’m handling it_.

He wakes up most nights still reaching for her, as if those few peaceful evenings of dreamless sleep were enough to permanently ruin him for loneliness. He wakes up from nightmares of Raleigh’s smile and Thane’s apologies and Draven’s disdainful sneer, and his fingers slide across the sheets, and for a few precious seconds he thinks _she’s there_ , except then he opens his eyes, encounters nothing on the other side of the bed, and remembers.

He sometimes reaches for someone next to him, when he’s having a difficult time with his leg in the cold, and he wonders how often he used her shoulder for leverage without even thinking about it, without noticing how quickly she had become so essential to him that he relied on her even for walking. For sleeping. For driving away the memories of past horrors so he could get through the day without feeling more hopeless than the one before.

Now that she’s gone, _everything_ seems worse.

Of course he isn’t handling it. They’re right not to believe him.

* * *

Coming back to Hoth after an assignment is always reason to be a little on edge, but he’s nursing a blaster burn on his arm that stings enough to distract him, and he has to go rummaging through the storage room – Jyn’s cabin – for medigel, and so he’s even more on edge than usual.

He snaps, “don’t tell me you believe in that superstitious nonsense,” when he sees Bodhi’s fingers playing over the crystal he wears around his neck while they wait to be cleared to land. Bodhi tucks it back into his shirt, guiltily, looking like a scolded child.

“No. No, of course not. I just like it.”

Cassian apologizes, but it’s gruffer than he would like. And Bodhi’s gaze is soft, is wary, is sad, and Cassian hates that he keeps proving them so correct. He stalks out into the hanger the moment the ship has landed, leaving his team behind.

* * *

Most days, they do him the courtesy of pretending they’ve forgotten how much he drank and sulked the day she left. Chirrut in particular does him the courtesy of not telling anyone that, after finally crawling into his new, frozen bunk (the day they headed back to Hoth coinciding with the day Jyn left was, maybe, the worst coincidence of his life), he cried, forgetting that Chirrut was the one who helped him get there, and that he hadn’t left yet. They do him the courtesy of pretending not to notice his fits of temper and irritability.

They do him a lot of courtesy, is the point. And every time he fails to be grateful for it, it just makes him feel guilty all over again. They don’t mean to make it more difficult. They’re trying to help. And in his less bitter moments, he can even appreciate that. It just...isn’t helping.

It makes all the acidic memories eat away at him faster. The smile on Jyn’s face when she looked down at him in the medbay. The tears in her eyes when she stopped herself from saying she couldn’t bear to be around him. It makes those memories stronger, because they _know_. They know how much those memories hurt him, and they know they can’t do anything to help.

* * *

_“I forgot you were there,” he had said to Chirrut, trying to wipe at his eyes in a way that was less obvious, having forgotten for a moment that Chirrut could not see him and also probably knew he was crying anyway. Chirrut was looking down at him sadly, not judgmental, not smiling, nothing like the man he was. Cassian was too drunk to snap at him to get out. Too tired._

_“I’ve been waiting for a good moment to give you this, away from prying eyes,” Chirrut said, and he slid a datapad out of his robes, handing it down to Cassian. It dropped onto his chest, and Cassian blinked at it, fumbled with it._

_The screen lit up, and he read._

Draven did this. Have to leave home for now. Will contact and explain. I’m sorry. I don’t want this but it isn’t my choice to make. Don’t trust Draven. I’m sorry.

_“She slipped it to me when she was leaving. There was someone watching her, so she could not speak openly.”_

_Cassian saw the man too. A soldier he didn’t know by name._

Draven did this _._

_“I don’t know exactly what she said to you, Captain. But I think that what is on that datapad is more important.”_

_“Thank you Chirrut,” he said. The cold of Hoth was starting to set in, the warmth of his shame and the alcohol fading as his head cleared, as he read the words again hungrily. He tried to think of every_ single _thing she said to him, every look she gave him. Every incongruous moment._

Leaving home for now.

It’s not my home.

_He tapped the datapad against his knee, trying to force his thoughts into something less hazy. Chirrut still stayed there, waiting._

_“Has it helped?” the guardian asked. Cassian ran his hand over his face._

I can’t stomach it anymore _._ I can’t stomach…

_“I think so,” he said, quiet. “Thank you, Chirrut.”_

_“We will get through this, Captain.”_

Will contact and explain.

_“I…believe you.”_

_Chirrut smiled finally, and he squeezed Cassian’s shoulder before he went._

I don’t want this _._

* * *

But it has been a month, and there has been nothing. No contact. No explanation. No sign of Jyn. No word from her. No word _of_ her, either. And every day they look at him with more tension behind their eyes, and every day he grows a little more uncertain. He hasn’t told any of them what the datapad said. Some days, he comes close. When Bodhi asks, in that quiet way he has (where he pretends to be capable of casual questions) if anyone’s heard from Jyn. When Baze draws further into himself, scowling at the empty seat at their table in the mess where Jyn should be. He thinks of pulling out her datapad and letting them read it.

But it’s been so long. What if it was a lie? What if it was just something she left for him, to spare his feelings? Bodhi thinks that something drove her out, and in his clearest moments, Cassian thinks he’s right.

It’s just that there’s room for doubt, even still. And it’s easier to refuse to talk about her. It’s easier to remind himself that _will contact and explain_ hasn’t happened.

Jyn is not here, but Draven is. And Cassian knows that _don’t trust Draven_ is true, is good advice, and yet. And yet. 

It just isn’t that easy.

* * *

After a week, he tried. He went to Draven, gritted his teeth against the fear that rose within him, and he said, “we need to talk about Jyn.”

Draven, eyebrows raised over his datapad, as if he had not expected this conversation, was the definition of nonplussed.

But that meant next to nothing to Cassian, who learned everything he knew about hiding his emotions from this man.

“You sent for me, and you weren’t there. And someone was watching Jyn when she was leaving. Shadowing her.”

“Are you accusing me of something, Captain Andor?”

“Yes.”

Draven smiled at the blunt answer, though it was the kind of smile Cassian dreaded seeing from his superior, because it was a smile that was wrong, was harsh, was never real.

“I spoke to Erso before she left, yes. And I made certain that she was escorted out without causing any more damage. Is that what you wanted to hear?”

“ _Why_?”

Draven looked at him for a long moment, mulling it over. Cassian kept quiet, kept his hands clenched by his sides, tried not to react. Draven wasn’t a man who respected a _scene_. He was a man who respected rationality, who respected straightforwardness, who respected calm.

Finally, Draven tapped on his datapad a few times, spinning it around to face Cassian, on the desk in front of him.

Cassian closed his eyes against the sight, but forced them open again, forced himself to look up at Draven.

“You showed this to her?” he asked. The anger was in his voice, though he tried not to let it be.

“I did. Do you object?”

“Of course I object!”

Draven gave a small snort of unamusement at that, moving around to the front of his desk and leaning back against it, folding his arms. Casual. Unaffected. But _too_ unaffected, Cassian thought.

He couldn’t be sure. He was _never_ sure.

“What do you object to? I showed her nothing that wasn’t true. This is your own report, your own writing. So is this one. And this.”

Scrolling through, making sure Cassian was looking. Assassinations. Mercy killings. Killings to prevent exposure. Killings to keep Rebel operatives from talking. _Like Thane. Just like Thane._

“ _Why_?” he needed to keep the focus on what Draven had done, because he knew how easy it was for Draven to distract him. For Draven to misdirect his anger.

“She deserved the chance to make her own choice,” Draven replied. “Is it any surprise that she chose to leave? After seeing _this_?”

(Cassian didn’t know, would probably never find out, how cruel Draven’s use of that phrase really was, and how cruel Draven felt, spitting Jyn’s words back at the man who truly did _deserve the choice_.)

_Draven did this_. She could have meant _this_ , couldn’t she?

But also: _I don’t want this_.

_Leaving home for now_.

“No,” Cassian said, more insistent, swallowing back his reflexive response: acceptance. “No, she wouldn’t have just left. Not if someone wasn’t…”

“So you’re accusing me of _forcing_ her to leave? I was nowhere near her when she boarded the Falcon. I was nowhere near her when she told you she was leaving, was I? She said whatever she said to you, and she left of her own power. Do you know how this sounds, Captain Andor? Coming to me like this, raving like this?”

Cassian faltered.

Cassian _always_ faltered when it came to Draven.

Because what was he supposed to do? Persist? He could hear Draven’s words, hear how absurd it sounded. What could Draven have done to force her out?

_Draven did this._

“I don’t know exactly what you did,” he said. “But I know this was you.”

“It was. I own that. I showed her this, and I let her know the things you’ve done for this Rebellion. But it was her choice.”

_Apologetic_. He sounded apologetic. And that was too much. Cassian swallowed back any further words, dismissed himself before he could say anything else he would regret.

* * *

Whenever he starts to doubt too much, he rereads the message. He tries to remember. _Draven did this. I’m sorry. I don’t want this. I’m sorry._ He remembers her hand reaching for his in the darkness of his quarters on the ship, drawing it back over her stomach. Remembers her standing in the doorway of his cell, impossibly _there_ when she should have been back on Hoth, her eyes wide and her breath catching at the sight of him in the same moment his breath stuttered at the sight of her.

Her kiss.

But still. The days pass without contact, without the promised explanation, and he has to wonder. He has to wonder about the tears that were in her eyes when she said she was leaving. Has to wonder about _I can’t stomach you anymore_. Has to wonder about those files on the datapad. The boy he murdered, because that boy could have told the Imperials who Joreth Sward really was. The man he tortured because he needed to know what the Imperials knew about the safehouse on Coruscant.

He imagines Jyn reading the details, and his fingers curl into fists, and it gets harder to remember his conviction when he said to Draven _she wouldn’t just leave_. It’s hard to hold on to that feeling of certainty when every evidence points to him reading it wrong, points to him _hoping_ where he shouldn’t.

_Is it any surprise that she left?_

* * *

Cassian finishes debriefing Draven on Rogue One’s trip to Naboo. Nothing more than a message delivery. Draven (even _Draven_!) asks him if he’s all right. Cassian gives him as terse and standard an answer as he can. Draven actually hesitates, but in the end he gives Cassian another order.

Another solo mission, just he and K-2SO. An assassination.

Cassian accepts it, and the weight of it pushes his shoulders down just a little bit further.

* * *

“If you could have only felt the weight of it.”

Cassian, only halfway into his quarters, curses and hits the light switch. The light above flickers – the lights in Alpha are always flickering, lately – but reveals Chirrut sitting quietly in Cassian’s chair like that’s a normal thing to do.

“What are you doing?”

“Sorry. Did I forget to turn on the light again?”

“You know you did. What do you want?”

“You’re tearing yourself apart for nothing.”

“For nothing.”

Said flatly, dispassionately, but he has no doubt that Chirrut can tell the passion is there, barely contained beneath the desperate walls Cassian has been rebuilding for the past month. Walls that were so carefully torn down by the whole team, leaving him exposed, vulnerable.

“If you could have only felt what I felt when she said her goodbyes.”

“I’m not interested in talking about this.”

“My hand was on her heart and I could feel it beat faster when I told her that leaving would break your spirit.”

“Well, it was nice of you to warn her.”

“Your bitterness does you no favors.”

“And your constant attempts to fix me? What favors are they doing you?”

“I thought she would be back by now,” Chirrut admits, and Cassian isn’t clear on _why_ he’s saying it, until he continues, “I should have been trying harder to make you see, but I thought she would be back. It hurt her so badly to leave. She seemed so certain it was _temporary._ I thought that whatever was driving her away wouldn’t be strong enough to keep her from us.”

Guilt again. Guilt stronger even than the bitterness, and he feels the fight leave him.

“You all should have left with her,” he says.

“Would you want us to go, Captain?”

Not answering that, Cassian continues, “what was driving her away was _me_. That’s why she hasn’t come back. I’m still here.”

Chirrut scoffs and says, “even you can’t believe that.”

“What else would I believe? When I asked her what I had done and she said it wasn’t about me? When I could see the lie in her face and hear it in her voice? What am I to believe, Chirrut?”

“That Jyn cares for you more than any living person.”

Cassian hates that years of disappointed hopes, years of loneliness and isolation, have not been enough to make him immune to the thud of his heart against his chest that follows those words.

But no, no. He shoves it down.

“Stop it,” he says.

“You and Jyn are alike in that you don’t like to hear difficult truths.”

The wall crumbles, just a bit. His anger comes out in his voice, snapping, cracking, his emotions rising.

“No. I don’t like to hear pretty lies. If all you can offer me is empty comfort, that’s of no use to me.”

“You would understand if you had felt it. It broke her heart to leave you. Even now, I can feel her pain, clinging to you. Clinging to us all. If she wanted to leave, I don’t think it would have hurt her so much.”

Cassian tramps down the slightest spark of hope that flares in his chest to hear Chirrut say that.

“Go back to your own room, Chirrut,” he says. And Chirrut stands, disappointed.

“Don’t let your hate cloud your vision. You’ll need it in the days to come if you have any hope of seeing.”

“Thank you, as always, for the cryptic advice,” Cassian says. Chirrut sighs. Chirrut hesitates. But Chirrut leaves.

* * *

He’s in the hallway, feeling his way along the wall to his room – Baze will no doubt be sorry that it didn’t work but smug because he predicted that it wouldn’t – when he hears metal footsteps stops in front of him.

“Hello, K,” he says in greeting. The droid doesn’t respond for so long a moment that Chirrut almost keeps going, but finally K-2SO speaks.

“Do you know where Jyn is?” he asks.

For a moment, Chirrut considers that Bodhi may have accidentally wiped the droid of the past month while trying to help him with his backup.

“Jyn is gone,” he says.

“Yes, I am aware of that. But Bodhi said you would be the person to ask. I think we should find her.”

Chirrut is not an easy person to shock. K-2SO has somehow managed it.

“Why?” he finally asks.

“Why should we find her? Do you not want to find her?”

“Why do _you_ want to find her?”

“The data supports returning her to her place here.”

“What data?”

At this point, Chirrut has actually figured it out, but he kind of wants to make K-2SO say it.

“Cassian’s odds of survival have been steadily low for years. He is a spy, and he is very reckless. After Scarif, he began to display increased self-preservation instincts. It took some time for me to derive their cause, because humans are so difficult to analyze sometimes, but it became clear to me that the cause was Jyn Erso. But now Jyn is gone, and his odds of survival have begun to drop again. At first, I could not fathom…oh. You are laughing.”

“I could have told you all of this months ago,” Chirrut chuckles.

“Not with numbers.”

“Numbers are useless. It’s what you feel about a person.”

“I am a droid. My entire being is numbers. Do come up with a better argument if you’re going to be ridiculous. Well? Will you help me? If it were up to me, I would not care where Jyn Erso is, but it matters to Cassian, and Cassian matters to me.”

Chirrut allows a small smile at that. As much as the droid unsettles him, he finds something touching in his loyalty to their Captain.

“I don’t know where Jyn is,” he admits. “But I know she left for a reason that she believes to be important. We should respect that. We cannot simply go find her and try to make her come back against her will. I may not agree with much of what the Captain says these days, but I agree with that. Even though he’s saying it for the wrong reasons.”

“What are the wrong reasons?” K-2SO asks. Chirrut tries to decide if the droid is being facetious but decides to answer him sincerely anyway.

“Ego. Self loathing. Fear.”

“All of which Cassian has denied.”

“You think he’s going to admit to those things?”

“Based on past experiences? Cassian does not ‘admit to’ much.”

“I’ll find out where she is,” Chirrut says. It may be a somewhat sudden decision, but he’s not a man who’s in the habit of lying to himself: he’s been looking for an excuse. “But first, I’ll find out why she left. Perhaps it will help Cassian understand.”

“If you need my assistance, let me know,” K-2SO says, his voice lowered to the pitch of a conspirator. Chirrut has lived a long life – longer than he ever dared expect – and it has been a life filled with oddness. A life filled with bizarre friends, fearsome foes, and plenty of stories.

And yet a droid offering, with all the clandestine secrecy of a Hutt informant, to help him go behind the back of his master to track down a woman the droid doesn’t even particularly like, is maybe one of the strangest things that has ever happened to him.


	2. Impatience is not a Virtue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know that I've thrown the word "comedic" around before, but this chapter actually IS pretty comedic, without my usual "comparatively" or "relatively" qualifier needed. I mean, you know, there's a bit of angst, as always, but it's mostly 5,000 words of Chirrut being, in my opinion, the best.

It’s raining when Cassian’s target ducks into an empty alleyway, head down, eyes on the ground ahead of him. The perfect spot for Cassian to corner him. The rain makes the blade in his hands slippery, but it’s easy enough to press it into his target’s neck, swiftly, silently, the target not having the time to make even the smallest sound of surprise. The target is distracted, not expecting the danger, and it’s easy enough to kill him, and it’s easy enough for Cassian to make his escape after, as well.

It’s easy, but it roils in his stomach as he shoves his hands into his coat pockets to hide the blood on his fingers. It’s easy, but it burns inside him.

_This is why she left you_ , he tells himself as he walks back to the transport. _This is why she couldn’t stand to be near you for even a second longer._

He thinks of her telling him _hurry up_ , on Hoth, the way her expression sparkled with mirth when he turned to look at her. Her eyes looking up at him in the elevator on Scarif. He thinks of her smile when he said _welcome home_. The look on her face when he came back for her on Kopha.

He feels the low ache of his heart trying to adjust to the fact that he was damaged irreparably by her presence. Like a knife embedded deep in his chest, keeping him from bleeding out but still destroying him inside. Perhaps Cassian was never as emotionless, never as blank, as his face suggested, but he was a fair sight better at compartmentalizing than he is now. Was it his love for her that did that? Or was it the loss of it?

Draven asking him, _is it any surprise that she left?_

A spark of anger, but it fizzles quickly. Draven’s involvement was not a charitable act, but if the contents of his revelation so disgusted Jyn, drove her so quickly from the entire damn Rebellion, then maybe it was good that Draven did what he did. Self-serving, certainly. After all, now Cassian is back to taking these missions again. These missions he was too disgusted to take when he had Jyn near, when he remembered the hate in her eyes after Eadu, when he had something new and different to live for. But all Draven really did was expose Jyn to a part of Cassian that has been beneath the surface since before she met him. All Draven did was tell her the truth.

_She deserved the chance to make her own choice._

Cassian should have told her. _He_ should have allowed her to make the choice. Didn’t Draven just do what Cassian should have done from the beginning?

* * *

Chirrut does his best to take advantage of Cassian’s absence. Cassian is a keen observer, even when he’s distracted by bitter thoughts and self-hatred.  He would notice Chirrut lurking. And he would probably guess what it was about. Cassian is quick to recognize when Chirrut is scheming – _because you are always scheming,_ Baze pointed out when Chirrut voiced the complaint earlier this morning – and would turn him away before Chirrut could discover anything important.

Anyway, Chirrut takes offense to both of them. This isn’t so much scheming as it is repairing. Healing. _Solving_.

If there’s anything that Chirrut likes more than making people laugh, it’s fixing them. Perhaps that’s why he’s even here, why he rescued Jyn Erso and Cassian Andor and befriended them to the point where he can no longer imagine ever being separated from them. Perhaps that’s why he’s drawn to them, and to the immensely lovable Bodhi Rook. Perhaps that’s why he can _feel_ them the way he can, nestled close against his heart like lost children.

And perhaps that’s why he’s here, lurking about in the intelligence headquarters. The hastily-constructed addition to Hoth Alpha was supposed to be far more temporary than this, but the delays in constructing Echo Base were also not entirely unexpected, and so they’ve built up an impressive base here. Patchwork and probably not as secure as Draven would like, but things seem to be operating smoothly enough.

Well, for the most part.

Draven is supposed to be the head of intelligence, but Chirrut can’t say he’s very impressed. The general stalks around his domain, moving from place to place, barking orders and checking in on his agents in the field. It seems to be business as usual, except he never notices the people around him. Chirrut can fit easily into shadow, can tuck himself into the spaces around Draven.

He can listen, overhear, infer.

Which would be exactly what he needs, if only Draven would say anything about Cassian or Jyn to _anyone_.

Draven checks in on Cassian’s progress with a few other agents, who are monitoring communications channels, but he doesn’t make any unprofessional comments aside to his people, doesn’t gossip, doesn’t say anything that’s helpful in any way.

Not that that’s unexpected, but Chirrut can’t even read a _vibe_ off the head of spies. Much like Cassian, Draven’s emotions are so tightly controlled that even a man as insightful as Chirrut, a man as in-tune with the Force, cannot fully interpret him.

He gives it a try – _stubborn_ , Baze will probably say, later – but in the end has to admit defeat. He slips away as easily as he had slipped in.

Chirrut feels the unfamiliar sting of failure, tinged with desperation. Cassian is miserable, and he is every day falling more and more into the trap of believing Jyn’s spoken words rather than the ones she took the time to write down where no one else could see them. Jyn, too, is in pain. She misses them. Chirrut can feel that more strongly with every passing day, like a piece of his heart has been hollowed out. Bodhi will hurt until everyone around him stops hurting, and he each day clutches the Kyber crystal more tightly. Even Baze, sturdy, stalwart, is less content than he used to be. _It was always going to end_ , he said last night, whispering into the air between them as they huddled close under their blankets. _We haven’t had much luck with companions. Present company excluded_.

But he can fix this. Chirrut is convinced he can fix this.

* * *

When Cassian and K-2SO return from their assignment, Chirrut is waiting.

Cassian is inherently suspicious of the guardian, so he slows as he reaches him, expression carefully neutral because Baze, leaning with his customary casual air against a nearby broken-down speeder, is watching with that _look_ he gets. The look that tells Cassian he’s _interpreting_ what Cassian’s expression means.

It’s an expression Cassian hates, because the older man is unnervingly good at it, and because Cassian knows that Baze only pays so much attention so that he can describe everything to Chirrut later.

“Welcome back,” Chirrut says. “How was your trip?”

“The mission was a success,” K-2SO answers before Cassian can. “I stayed in the ship the entire time. It was terrible.”

“Yes, I imagine it would be,” Chirrut says. “For you as well, Cassian.”

Cassian looks away from the guardian’s sightless eyes, suppressing a scowl that wants to flash across his features. He hardly needs the judgment in Chirrut’s tone. He hardly needs the pity.

“I need to check in,” he says, moving away. “Are you coming?”

This to K-2SO, who has stopped suddenly, abruptly, standing in front of their teammates.

“I’ll be along shortly,” he says. “I would like to…catch up.”

“Catch up?”

This stops Cassian’s forward momentum, and he turns to look back at K-2SO curiously. It’s an absurd thing for the antisocial droid to say. Utterly absurd, and Cassian is instantly on his guard, but K-2SO just looks at him, waiting for him to leave.

“These are my friends, and I have not seen them in some time. I am not in a foul mood, unlike you, so it is reasonable for me to stop and talk with them, Cassian.”

It’s pointed, overly explained, obviously a lie. Cassian can’t bring himself to care.

“Fine,” he says, and he continues on his way.

* * *

“That was…masterful,” Chirrut says, somehow maintaining a straight face. Baze snorts behind him.

“Have you discovered anything about the whereabouts of…our target?”

“Our _target_? K2, there is no one here. You can say her name.”

“I am being careful. Well?”

Chirrut sighs. He hates to have to admit defeat, especially to a droid who isn’t known for his gentle nature.

“No. I haven’t discovered anything. General Draven isn’t one to gossip.”

“Of course not. He is the head of Rebel intelligence.”

“I was very close to him, in his domain, for several hours. What I need is for someone to give him _reason_ to talk about her.”

“I can do that.”

Chirrut feels Baze’s amusement at that, as well. It always makes Baze’s presence feel warmer, gentled at the edges a bit. Chirrut smiles over his shoulder, their delight sparking together at the thought of K-2SO attempting subterfuge.

“It’s a tempting prospect,” Chirrut says. K-2SO seems to sense the sarcasm.

“I am very good at directing conversation.”

“You aren’t,” Chirrut laughs.

“I am a passable liar.”

“Unless you’ve made improvements since Jedha…”

“That was different. I was…under pressure.”

“I think perhaps it’s best if we don’t make things worse. Besides, what reason would Draven have to tell you anything? He would know you would just turn around and tell it all to Cassian.”

K-2SO thinks about that for a long moment.

“I will update you when I have determined a solution,” he says, and he turns and walks after the Captain.

“It was worth a shot,” Baze says, which feels like consolation.

“If you think I’m going to give up so easily…”

A snort, and Baze says, “I would have to be a fool.”

“You _are_ a fool. But you’re right not to doubt me.”

“I still doubt you’ll be able to fix this. I _don’t_ doubt how stubborn you are.”

“Semantics.”

* * *

Dinner is an uncomfortable affair for everyone, but Bodhi is, as always, an enormous help in that area. If there’s anyone who can distract Cassian from his thoughts, it’s the pilot, whose gentle conversation and genuine excitement to discuss something as inoffensive as base maintenance at least keeps Cassian from retreating inward entirely.

Maybe it’s just because yesterday he was planning an assassination, but he’s feeling more bitter, more afraid, than ever. He has to wonder if Bodhi would leave, too. If Bodhi knew, would he smile so readily? Would he be so eager to sit beside Cassian? Would he still offer up his dessert and pretend he wasn’t going to eat it anyway?

If Draven decided that Bodhi needed to go next, that Cassian was still too distracted by his newfound family, would Bodhi take one look at that datapad and follow Jyn?

Sometimes Cassian wishes Draven would get it over with. Tear all of them from him, because at least then he wouldn’t be letting anyone down. He wouldn’t have to pretend. He would be left to suffer in silence, his dreams waking him every morning far too early, his leg stiff and occasionally useless, his mind blank of anything except the mission. He would be allowed to revert back to the man he was before, hating it all a little more than he used to, loathing himself a little more than he used to. At least they would all be safe from him.

* * *

K-2SO knocks on Chirrut and Baze’s door in the middle of the sleep cycle.

They know it’s K-2SO because he very loudly announces, “this is K-2SO. I would like to have a normal, routine conversation about nothing in particular.”

“He thought he was going to be a _spy_ for you,” Baze reminds Chirrut as he disentangles himself from Chirrut’s still-drowsy grasp and the blankets that wind around his legs as he goes. Chirrut would probably find this hysterical if he was just a bit less tired, but he’s exhausted and cold, and the last thing he wants is this unsettling droid standing in his quarters.

But he sits up, wraps himself in a blanket, waits for the sound of K-2SO’s clomping metal feet.

“What could you _possibly_ want?” Baze asks, staying standing by the door, though it must be freezing out there, away from the blankets.

“I have been doing some research,” K-2SO says. Chirrut isn’t sure how to classify it, entirely, but he’s fairly certain he would call the droid _giddy_.

“What kind of research?”

“Captain Solo dropped Jyn Erso off on Takodana. He reported this fact to General Draven when he returned. I was also able to learn from a talkative protocol droid that Captain Solo gave Jyn credits that came from General Draven.”

“He _paid_ her to leave?” Baze wonders, irritated and incredulous, but Chirrut shakes his head.

“No, that wouldn’t interest Jyn.”

“She is a thief,” K-2SO points out. “She stole Cassian’s blaster and never gave it back.”

“Whose side are you on?” Chirrut asks.

“Cassian’s.”

“No, I mean…fine. Yes. Cassian’s. But you cannot think Jyn actually left us for a measly portion of credits.”

“No,” Baze admits. “But…”

“Why would General Draven offer her credits?” K-2SO asks when Baze hesitates.

“Because General Draven felt guilty enough about making her leave that he offered her some form of compensation, obviously,” Chirrut says. “He is not an evil man. But the Force moves darkly around him, always. He is a man with a weight on him. If he felt guilt, he would try to alleviate it as much as he could. Offering Jyn some help would not be too much for him, I don’t believe.”

“Did you find out where Jyn is now?” Baze asks, accepting Chirrut’s interpretation as truth.

“That information was not available to me. But there’s something else. She’s been communicating with him.”

“How do you know that?”

“By pretending to undergo maintenance in the intelligence headquarters, I was able to access some internal logs. I intercepted records of communication from Takodana. Then from Leita. Then Kafrene. As they originate from Takodana two days after Jyn’s arrival, there is a ninety-two percent chance that they are communications from her. They follow the same pattern. I could not access the contents of the messages, but they are similarly constructed.”

“Has Draven sent any response?” Chirrut asks.

“No.”

Chirrut is a man of instinct. Of feeling. Of understanding. He knows that that fact alone means that K-2SO finds him infuriating. And he knows that if he says something now, the droid will probably tell Cassian what he’s about to say, mostly out of annoyance.

“K2, thank you for the work you’ve done,” he says instead.

“I told you I could be an effective spy.”

“Yes, and you were obviously correct. But for now, perhaps we can keep this from Cassian. Until we’ve gathered more evidence.”

K-2SO considers that. Chirrut chose his words carefully, implying this deceit would be temporary. Using the word _evidence_ , which the droid will obviously like. And K-2SO agrees, after some hesitation. Tells them both that they look like they need more sleep, which may be his way of attempting a friendly goodnight. Baze finally returns to bed after locking the door behind him, warming the spot by Chirrut’s side which had started to go irritatingly cold in his absence.

He waits, settling in, drawing his arm over Chirrut’s shoulder, his hand resting in the familiar place on Chirrut’s arm, fingers curling in the same spot it has for many years. And Chirrut waits, because he knows Baze Malbus better than he has ever known another person, and he knows that Baze is thinking of what to say.

Finally: “she is trying to contact us.”

“Yes. Cassian specifically. That message she left him…there must have been some promise of communication that she’s trying to fulfill.”

“But it hasn’t reached him.”

“No. And that could explain why he has been holding it together so well. But it’s been a long time now. He’s spiraling.”

“Why did you not tell that to the droid?”

“Because there is no proof of it.”

“But you feel it?”

“But I feel it.”

“I hope you’re right.”

Chirrut doesn’t bother to say the words _I am_. He knows Baze understands the confidence is implied. Baze drops a kiss to his forehead: gentle, thoughtful. He’s worried, but Chirrut knows him. Baze does his complaining about Chirrut’s _feelings_ and his intuitions, but he has also learned to trust them.

After so many years together, Baze knows that when Chirrut sets his heart to something, there is nothing that can stand in his way of it.

* * *

General Draven leaves the following day, called away to aid in a mission elsewhere, and Chirrut knows that this is the opportunity he needs. Without the other man’s toxic influence hanging over the young spy, Chirrut can try to get through to him.

* * *

Elsewhere on Hoth, safely ensconced in the partially constructed Echo Base, Leia Organa frowns down at a message from General Draven: _opportunity for takeover of Kazadu mining facility. Send anyone you can spare. Do not send Rogue One crew._

“Do not send Rogue One crew?” Leia asks the horrified technician, teeth bared.

“I…that’s what the message says,” the technician squeaks, and Leia crumples the piece of paper in her hands, eyes blazing.

* * *

Chirrut knows that Baze is probably already rolling his eyes the moment Cassian sits down at their table in the mess, but Chirrut doesn’t care. He knows that Cassian has to travel to Echo Base in the afternoon to meet with the princess, but for now he’s all theirs, and Chirrut isn’t the type to waste time. 

(Considering after meeting him twice, Chirrut marched up to Baze and asked, _are you as beautiful as you sound?_ he has a feeling Baze would agree with that sentiment).

“Draven,” he says. He’s skillful about it. Subtle: he waits until Cassian has a mouthful of food, making him far less likely to bolt at the first sign of difficult conversation. “How much do you trust him?”

“Right. Good…breakfast conversation,” Bodhi grumbles, though he looks curiously at Cassian, waiting for an answer.

“The man tried to have him assassinated,” Baze points out. Cassian swallows heavily, choking back indignation. Chirrut knows he only has a few seconds left before Cassian can interrupt.

“Yes, but it’s difficult to question someone you’ve been programmed to trust.”

“Programmed?” Cassian manages, annoyed, still with half a mouthful.

“Would ‘raised’ be less offensive to you?”

“This whole conversation is offensive to me.”

“So you’re saying you trust him, then.”

“What is this about?”

“Don’t ask him that,” Baze groans. Cassian points at him, agreeing.

“Never mind. He’s right. We aren’t doing this.”

“Draven is keeping something from you.”

Cassian is halfway out of his seat already, his tray of food abandoned, but he freezes when Chirrut speaks, and for a moment Chirrut thinks he has convinced him.

But Cassian’s voice is quiet, resigned, when he says, “I know what Draven did.”

“Then why…?”

Cassian hovers there for a moment longer, and finally Chirrut hears him sit.

“This is the last time we’re talking about this,” the Captain hisses, his voice so low that Chirrut can hear Bodhi leaning in to hear.

“You should know better by now than to assume that,” Baze says. A sound like a laugh from Cassian, but it’s humorless, and he pauses for only another moment before speaking. The words are rough, drawn out of him like this is something he’s been dreading having to say.

“Draven showed Jyn the after action reports I’ve written for some of the missions I’ve worked. Some of the worst things I’ve done. He thought that she deserved the choice, and he was right. She left because of what she saw.”

Silence for a moment, and Chirrut imagines that Cassian is probably looking at him, waiting. Chirrut’s next words are spoken as respectfully as he can manage, because he can feel Cassian’s wariness. His impatience to have this conversation finished.

“Have you considered _why_ General Draven would feel the need to do that?”

“I know why he did it, and it doesn’t matter anyway. She chose to leave.”

“He’s the one who told you that, isn’t he? And you believe him?”

Cassian hesitates. Chirrut can feel the storm inside him. The warring thoughts. The tiny, tenuous sliver of hope that connects him to Jyn, wherever she may be. The words from the datapad, the message Jyn passed to Chirrut. Chirrut can feel it all swirling inside Cassian, fighting for dominance.

“Yes, I do,” Cassian says, and Chirrut can tell that it’s only half a lie.

Waiting a few more beats to be polite, Cassian clutches his water glass, and Chirrut can feel him shaking from here. With emotion, with anger, it’s difficult to tell. So much of everything is contained in the Captain. The rigid walls he props up inside him are supposed to keep things out, but since Chirrut has known him, they have been more effective at keeping things in. It gives the impression of someone _trapped_ , someone lost, someone who never releases the pain and simply lets it build.

As Cassian walks away, shoulders hunched with tension, Chirrut feels Jyn’s sadness walking with him, and he aches with pity for these two children who never learned to love. Who have accidentally discovered the state of being without knowing the mechanics of it. And now, after all they’ve been through, find themselves apart.

“I assume it’s too much to hope that you’ll stop pestering him,” Baze says, but it’s gentle and understanding.

“I’m trying to help him, Baze.”

“Yes. By pestering him.”

“The answer’s yes. It is too much to hope.”

“Figured.”

* * *

For all Chirrut’s earnestness, for all the dim, repressed hopes that the warrior’s certainty forces him to feel, it somehow doesn’t land with Cassian nearly as much as a mostly innocent comment from Bodhi.

It’s really only innocent because _everything_ Bodhi says is innocent. It’s obviously intentional. How could it _not_ be? But still. He raises a point that’s important, that reminds Cassian, that makes the words _don’t trust Draven_ echo more fiercely in his mind than before.

“Your jacket,” Bodhi says in the doorway to Cassian’s room. “That blue coat, with the fur hood? Did she take it with her? Or did she leave it here?”

Cassian is suspicious, coming straight from the mess with Chirrut to this, but he can’t see a reason not to answer. And, like all of them, he has a hard time being intentionally mean to Bodhi. And he already owes him for snapping at him the other day.

“I don’t have it,” he says.

“Oh. Okay.”

Cassian isn’t going to ask. He doesn’t _want_ to ask. But Bodhi lingers just long enough that Cassian bites back his pride and asks, “why?”

“Was gonna ask to borrow it, but no, that makes sense.” He makes as if to move off, and Cassian isn’t going to stop him, but Bodhi pauses at the last moment and continues, “I mean, she slept in it every night you were gone. Makes sense that she would want to keep it with her if she had to leave.”

And then he’s gone, practically darting away, and Cassian would be annoyed except he’s actually absorbing the words.

Because, well, no. It _doesn’t_ make sense that Jyn would have taken it. Not if she had learned something about him that was so horrible it drove her out of the Rebellion, drove her away from him. She would have left the coat behind with the rest of the things she couldn’t bear.

There could be a hundred reasons the coat isn’t here where he left it. Maybe she left it on Yavin, or maybe she left it on the Falcon and took the damned thing with her by accident. But that isn’t the point. Not _really_. It’s just a suggestion of hope, a suggestion of _maybe_ that has a thousand counterarguments, but these suggestions of hope just keep adding up. Bodhi, Chirrut, Baze, even K-2SO. They all keep trying.

How much evidence does he need?

_Don’t trust Draven._

_I don’t want this_.

Maybe Draven is right. But Cassian feels this sinking dread that somehow, _again_ , he has let Draven convince him that he’s mad for thinking something he has every reason to suspect. Once again, Draven has been able to overpower his own thoughts with his suggestion, with the trust that he has trained into Cassian from childhood.

_Programmed_. Chirrut wasn’t wrong. Cassian was not raised by Draven so much as he was programmed by him. Draven called Cassian’s accusations absurd, but were they? Draven has proven himself adept at manipulating events to his favor. He has proven himself able and _willing_ to do things for the Rebellion that most would think too far. Cassian is living proof of that.

He can’t imagine what Draven said to make Jyn leave, and he can’t think of a reason why Jyn wouldn’t contact him if she really didn’t want to go, but that doesn’t mean that he should give up on finding answers. He has been too afraid that hope would turn to hurt if the truth was as bad as it seemed that he has reverted so quickly to a man he can no longer stomach being.

_Do you trust him_? Chirrut had asked. And the answer has always been _no_ , just as it has always been _yes_.

He looks down at his hands, and they’re shaking. Maybe it’s the cold, or the exhaustion of another mostly sleepless night, or the constant stresses pulling his body apart. But he suddenly feels as if he can see so much more clearly.

Draven isn’t here right now. He can’t turn his judgmental gaze on Cassian and say _what are you talking about?_ Or _is it any surprise that she left?_ Or _you of all people understand what needs to be sacrificed for the Rebellion, Cassian._

He does. He _does_. But there’s a small spark inside him that’s been learning, over the past few months, to hope for _more_.

He can’t be this man anymore. He can’t allow Draven to _make_ him into this man again.

_I don’t want this_.

* * *

On the short flight from Hoth Alpha to Echo Base, Cassian asks, “do you think Jyn left on her own?”

He doesn’t look at K-2SO when he asks. He keeps his eyes on the readouts, as if he had not asked at all. K-2SO’s machinery whirs quietly.

“Human behavior is difficult to interpret, particularly _hers._ Still. Statistically, I would say it’s not even significant,” he says. “Less than a five percent chance.”

Cassian can’t help but look up, eyes widening in the direction of his friend, surprise overriding his desire to seem casual.

“Less than five percent?”

“Admittedly, my data on Jyn Erso is less complete than I would prefer. But she has shown recurring lack of judgement when it comes to you. The entire crew factors into her decision making a majority of the time, especially Bodhi.” This part said with pride, like he agrees with her there. “But it is of a special strength and consistency with you. That she would voluntarily leave is, to put it mildly, unlikely. But there is something else that drives the number down past significance.”

“What?”

“I’m just making certain you’ll allow me to talk about it this time. You have not reacted favorably any of the four times I’ve previously tried to help you.”

“I’m sorry, K. I haven’t been…fair.”

“No, you haven’t. Am I allowed to tell you?”

“ _Yes_ , K.”

“I lied to Princess Leia.”

“That is…surprising? But what does this have to do with Jyn?”

“Chirrut is right. You are singularly minded. Although _his_ data comes from ‘emotional intuition’, which is…” a long, strange noise that is probably supposed to be insulting in some way. Cassian sighs, wishes that he had reprogrammed K-2SO to be not quite _such_ an asshole.

“K, will you just…”

“I lied to Princess Leia and that self-absorbed smuggler Han Solo because they hesitated when it came time to initiate the mission that saved your life. I told them all that it had an eighty-nine percent chance of success. Upon reflection, it was a poor lie. A quite risky plan. I’m surprised anyone believed eighty-nine percent at all. I should have said fifty-two. Still more than double the _actual_ odds that we would all die. I told Jyn about my lie, when we were alone. I thought she should know, since my estimates told me that she would be most likely to perish in the event of a mission failure.”

“Surprisingly kind from you,” Cassian can’t help but point out, blinking away the sudden, unwelcome remembrance of Jyn taking two blaster bolts to the stomach.

“She did not _have_ to forgive me for the way I spoke to her before we left Hoth. And she could have been far more angry with me for leaving you behind when you told me to, even though I knew it was a foolish thing for you to do. And so I returned the favor, like you tell me I should. This part of the story is the relevant part. When she was preparing to leave Yavin, Bodhi told me that he thought something was wrong. I trust Bodhi, so I went with him to see if I thought he was correct. During our conversation, I told her she was lying. She said that she was leaving because she wanted to leave, but she was lying. I could tell. Jyn Erso lies _a lot_. My data on her expressions, on her tone of voice, her body temperature, her…”

“I understand, K.”

“Impatience is not a virtue.”

“Are you quoting Chirrut again? What is _happening_ to you?”

“She _told_ me that there was an eighty-nine percent chance that she was leaving on her own. Based on my analysis, I believe that she wanted me to understand that she was agreeing with me in my assessment of her motivations. Namely: that she was lying.”

Silence, then. Cassian absorbs that data like a physical blow.

“Why didn’t you tell me…no, no. Don’t answer that. I know why.”

_Because you acted like a damned Rancor every time someone brought her up the first week, and after that you changed the subject. Because even if K had managed to get everything out, you would have found some ridiculous reason not to believe him, or to claim that he was mistaken, or to say he was reading too much into it._

“Thank you, K,” he says. K-2SO, if he’s as surprised by that as he probably should be, at least does Cassian the courtesy of not saying anything about it.

“I still don’t like her,” the droid says instead.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone continuing to give me feedback and give me the motivation to keep going! I honestly appreciate you all SO MUCH!!


	3. Who Got You the Plans, Jedi?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was actually going to skip today, but I found myself with some more time than I expected (after a BRUTAL day at work), so here's a fairly short update that is, unbelievably, once again mostly comedy and forward action (even Cassian's part is mostly comedic?? There are Original Trilogy Trio hijinks???) The next chapter is kind of a beast (unless I find a better way to cut it up), so I might actually end up skipping a day, but let's see how this pans out!

Cassian’s usual way of dealing with the endless hurricane that is Leia Organa and Han Solo is much the same as it is for everyone else: sit or lean against the nearest comfortable surface and _wait_. People trying to interrupt – even well-meaning friends like Luke or Wedge – are liable to have their heads torn off by the biting wit of one and the sarcastic barbs of the other. The only thing worse than facing down an angry Leia or an angry Han is facing both of them, facing their shared wrath at having their argument intruded on.

If there’s any true indication of how impatient Cassian is feeling, it’s the fact that he starts to walk toward them the moment he disembarks his ship in the hanger anyway.

“What are you _doing_?” Luke hisses, the Jedi sitting on a cargo crate beside his speeder, waiting out the storm. He catches Cassian’s sleeve as he passes, tugging him with surprising strength, making him go slightly off-balance, jerking back towards the younger man.

“I have an appointment with the princess,” Cassian says, voice pitched low despite his apparent willingness to march up to them and demand attention. “But first, I need to talk to Han.”

_I need to find out where he took her. I need to find out where she is._

“ _Han_? Seriously? Interrupting Han to talk to Leia is bad enough. Interrupting _Leia_ to talk to _Han_?” The blonde man scoffs, lets go of Cassian’s arm, holds up his hands. “She likes you, but I don’t think she likes you _that_ much. It’s your funeral.”

“Which one are you waiting for?”

“Leia. _I’m_ not suicidal.”

Which strikes Cassian as a vaguely insensitive thing to say to a man who has been ‘casually checked up on’ by too many people to not have been labeled a risk by _someone_ important (probably Leia: that’s her style of dramatic). But Luke Skywalker is nothing if not sensitive, and so Cassian knows it’s simple obliviousness. Adds to the farmboy’s charm, annoyingly.

“If we approach together…” Cassian starts, speaking in that friendly voice he knows is too fake to fool even Luke: the Jedi in training may be trusting, may be kind, but he’s seen Cassian’s neutral resting scowl too often to be fooled by sudden smiles.

Not buying it for a second, Luke crosses his arms over his chest.

“No way.”

“Why not?”

“She’ll still kill us.”

“She likes both of us. Twice as likely we’ll survive.”

“She’s winning the argument, though. You can’t interrupt that.”

He has a point. Cassian glances back at the princess and the smuggler, oddly quiet, for them. Still furious, still telegraphing every sentence with wild hand gestures, but with voices that don’t carry the way they usually do, shattering the peace of any room they’re in.

“What are they arguing about?”

Luke sends Cassian a pained look: _does it matter?_ It’s another good point. Cassian leans against the crate beside him, feeling his impatient annoyance fade, for a little while. He wonders if it’s a Jedi thing, or if Luke is just one of those people whose constant refusal to be pessimistic wears you down eventually. Like Bodhi. Like Chirrut.

Finally, Luke says, “I think they’re arguing about, um. Your…um. Jyn.”

Cassian’s hard-won calm vanishes in an instant, and he gets back to his feet.

“What? What are they saying? Why didn’t you… Come on. Now we need to interrupt them.”

“ _We_?”

“Get up! Let’s go!”

“No way!” Luke hisses, resisting Cassian’s attempts to get him to his feet. “Stop it! I blew up the Death Star! I don’t have to do anything!”

“Who got you the plans, Jedi?” Cassian growls back. Luke curses under his breath and allows Cassian to pull him up.

“You can’t keep _using_ that!”

“I’ll stop using it when it stops working.”

“This is embarrassing for both of you,” K-2SO points out from somewhere behind the speeder, out of view.

“Why don’t _you_ go interrupt her?” Luke asks.

“No. I don’t need to.” A low, pointed beeping from Luke’s astromech. It sounds a little like a laugh, and K-2SO draws himself up to his full height. “No, R2. I’m not _afraid_. Not that I feel required to prove myself to you in any way, but I am very busy.”

“We’re doing this,” Cassian says. Luke, though he seems to be giving it a real solid try, can’t come up with a reason why not to.

* * *

Fortunately, Leia and Han _do_ appear to be arguing about Jyn, because as soon as Han spots Cassian and Luke making their way into his narrow field of vision, he nudges her shoulder and points. Leia turns, mouth curling into an order to fuck off, but it smooths itself out when she realizes who it is.

“Cassian,” she says.

“What is it?”

“Hello to you too,” Han says.

“Shut up.” This from both Leia and Cassian, and Han turns incredulously to look at Chewbacca, who is not standing behind him, and probably hasn’t been for quite some time. Perturbed, Han looks at Luke for help instead.

“I’m here to talk to Leia too, actually,” Luke admits.

“ _Seriously_?” Han asks. He starts to turn to go, but Leia snags him by the inside of the elbow, and it’s as if the miniscule woman has the power to keep him rooted by the five fingers of one hand. Cassian feels a moment of intense sympathy for the smuggler. He knows the feeling.

“Where do you think _you’re_ going, flyboy? This concerns you, too.”

“Oh, it concerns me all right. That’s why I’m getting the hell out of here before _this_ one explodes.”

“What?” Cassian asks. “What is it? What’s happened?”

“Nothing’s…will you _stop_ it?” Leia hisses to Han. “You’re making him nervous.”

“ _I’m_ making…”

“I think maybe Cassian has been already way more patient than he should have to be,” Luke says carefully. More charm. More annoying. Cassian flashes him a reluctant smile.

“Let’s go somewhere a little more private,” Leia says, as if they haven’t been arguing in full view of all the workers in Echo Base’s hanger for however long they’ve been out here. Cassian swallows back an impatient demand to tell him everything, and he offers a tight nod instead.

* * *

The Falcon is chosen as the ‘more private’ place. Luke is, for some reason, still with them, and he makes himself comfortable in a chair in the main hold while Han sits on the couch, Leia and Cassian standing in front of him. It gives the impression of an interrogation for the smuggler, who leans back with one arm thrown over the couch as if he’s not uncomfortable, but it’s obvious that between Leia and Cassian, he’s having trouble deciding who he’s more worried about.

“Look,” Han says, spreading his hands, trying to control the situation. “I took the girl where she wanted to go. That’s it.”

“On Draven’s orders,” Leia says, glancing at Cassian to make sure he’s listening, as if anything could get him to stop.

“Draven’s the one who made the arrangements, yeah. He said I was supposed to take her wherever she said she wanted to go. Like I’m some kind of damn shuttle service.”

“And you listened?”

“He said the orders came from you.”

Cassian struggles to smooth his expression over at the very brief, very delicate softness he hears in Han’s tone when he says those words to the princess. It wars with the annoyed gruffness that is the smuggler’s default state of expression, but it’s there.

“When did you realize that they hadn’t?”

“When I came back and you asked me what the fuck I was thinking,” Han mutters, rubbing his shoulder as if in memory of the swat Leia no-doubt gave him.

_She lied_ , from K-2SO. _I don’t want this_ from Jyn. Cassian has to remind himself, because he feels the frustrated disappointment of _not enough_. This isn’t enough evidence. He was looking for something he couldn’t explain away. Something Draven couldn’t even wiggle out of.

“You took her to Takodana,” Leia says, as if for clarity, and Cassian tries to suppress the thrill of this information: he never asked anyone where Jyn went. It didn’t seem like it was his to know. But to hear it now sets his heart aching. Takodana. She was on Takodana.

“Yeah. We talked about it a little once she was ready.” A glance at Cassian, and Cassian would have to be far worse at this than he is not to pick up on what that expression means. _Once she had recovered from your conversation in the hanger_. He swallows back more questions. He lets Han speak. “She’d been to the castle before, was acquainted with Maz. Seemed a good place for her to find some work, and Maz would have a place for her to stay until she did.”

“Tell him what you told me,” Leia says, folding her arms over her chest, looking at Cassian.

“What part? Told you a lot of things.”

Leia sighs, closes her eyes, seems to be dreaming of an alternate timeline in which she never met this handsome smuggler and became acquainted with his propensity for pissing her off just because he likes the way it brings out the color in her cheeks.

“The thing about the credits,” she says, her words delivered through clenched teeth. Luke’s snicker isn’t very well hidden, and Han gives him a look of genuine betrayal before looking at Cassian.

“Draven gave me some credits to give to Erso. Not a lot, but enough to last her a couple weeks, if she was careful. Figured at the time he was sending her on some mission or something.”

“Without telling anyone? You really are _the worst._ Why the kriff would he do that?” Leia wonders, swiftly losing patience with Han again.

“Because of this one!” Han points out, gesturing to Cassian. “Has a conniption every time someone asks her to board a ship without asking him first. I figured you all were just done playing nice, done asking for permission. You all have a habit of doing shady shit like this. Why _not_ screw over one of your biggest heroes by making him miserable for a month or so until his little girlfriend comes back.”

Judging from the look of smug expectation on his face, Han expects Cassian to rise to the bait of _girlfriend_. He apparently doesn’t know Cassian very well. Cassian turns to the princess instead.

“Leia, I appreciate that you’re trying to help me, but it doesn’t tell me much. Whether or not Draven helped her out the door, she still could have left of her own power. I need to…”

Leia interrupts, giving a none-too-delicate snort of derision at that.

“Yeah, I thought so too, at first. But I couldn’t wrap my head around it. You have the unfortunate lack of confidence of a pockmarked Gungan, but those of us not bent backwards in self-flagellation could see how much she had grown over the past few months. She was happy. A bit reliant on you and your team, but happy.”

“Maybe she got tired of being called codependent,” Cassian gripes, mostly because he doesn’t like how close Leia seems to be veering to the truth. If there’s one thing he can salvage of his rapidly worsening life, he’d like it to be his friendship with the princess.

_She deserves to know the truth, too_ , his mind reminds him, _just like Jyn_.

“She did threaten it, when you were captured. Floated the idea of leaving the Rebellion behind. Ideological differences. For a while, I thought…but if it was about that, if it was about the fact that Draven and the Council hadn’t been willing to lift a finger to go after you, then surely she would have _told_ you that. Han said that what she said to you was much more…personal.”

Cassian lifts a glare in Han’s direction, which the smuggler accepts with a heavy sigh.

“Look, no offense Andor. There’s not much I _don’t_ tell the Princess when she asks.”

“If you know what she said to me, then I don’t see why it’s so hard for you to believe that I would have trouble…I just…it isn’t my place to question her decisions.”

Now Leia and Han and, traitorously, Luke, are all aligned against him, sending terribly fond eyerolls to each other, all of them looking at Cassian with something like amused disappointment.

“I told you. _This_ is why you should have come to me earlier,” Leia says to Han, apparently referencing their earlier argument. And, against every single scrap of conversation Cassian has overheard between the two since they began their aggressive dance around each other, Han actually _laughs_. Smiles. Shrugs.

“Maybe you’re right. Didn’t realize it had gotten that bad.”

“Not your place to question it,” Leia says, practically groaning the words. “You’re hopeless, Cassian. And it’s your place to question it now. In fact, it’s your job. General Draven has taken a sizable chunk of my forces to a small mining settlement in an asteroid colony. All on my orders, of course. Despite the constant lack of respect for my position and his insistence on double-checking my every word with Mon Mothma, I think I’ve been more than patient with him. Which means I was mightily fucking offended to receive a message telling me to send anyone I can spare, as long as I don’t send the Rogue One crew.”

Through his desire to keep his expression neutral, Cassian feels his eyebrows raise a bit.

“Seems mighty suspicious,” Han drawls. Leia looks at Cassian pointedly, her expression one of patience.

“You’re sending us because he asked you not to?” Cassian finally asks.

“I’m sending you because he _ordered_ me not to, and I’m not in the business of taking orders from men beneath me. And, more to the point, because he has been dodging my questions about Jyn’s defection, and because he lied to Han about my involvement, and I think there are answers to be found on Kazadu. Answers that would benefit both of us. I want you to go and find them.” When he hesitates, she says, “that wasn’t a suggestion, Captain.”

“Can’t believe that idiot Draven thought he’d order _you_ around,” Han says, oddly admiring, and Leia gives him a pointed little half smile that makes Luke’s entire face scrunch up.

“You try to order her around all the time,” he points out.

“Yeah, but that’s different. I’m…not a General.”

“You’re a _Captain_. That’s worse!”

“It’s different because Han never actually expects me to listen,” Leia says smugly. “Not even _he_ is that stupid.”

Han looks back at Cassian, his eyebrows ticking up. His expression clear: _you sure you even_ want _this?_

Bickering. Refusing to listen. Doing reckless, impulsive things and laughing off his concern after.

Cassian has never wanted _anything_ so much.

* * *

“This wasn’t my idea,” he says to the team, hoping to forestall any smug, gloating expressions passing between them.

But this is Rogue One, so even Chirrut and K-2SO manage to exchange glances with the people around them. K-2SO maybe doesn’t totally know what he’s doing, but he knows it’s smug, and that’s his favorite thing to be.

“I knew I liked the Princess,” Chirrut says, which predictably earns a long-suffering glare from Baze. “She has a strength of conviction that you _should_ have, Captain.”

“We still don’t know if it’s anything,” Cassian says. Warning them not to get their hopes up – his gaze lighting pointedly on Bodhi, whose fingers are white on his necklace. “There are a lot of reasons why Draven wouldn’t want us there. And even if Jyn _is_ there, it doesn’t mean she’s going to want to come back.”

_Is it any surprise that she left?_

“She has been trying to get in touch with you,” Baze says.

It takes a lot to surprise Chirrut. But his surprise is _visible_ on his face, his expression blanking into one of genuine annoyance as he turns toward his partner.

“We weren’t going to tell him that,” he says.

“That is _not_ the consensus we reached,” K-2SO says sharply in the same moment.

“ _We_?” Cassian asks, one hand pressed to his forehead, his voice weary, like he’s afraid to ask.

“You were sulking and being reckless. You know I loathe both of those things. Obviously I asked Chirrut for help. In the interest of honesty, I asked Bodhi for help, but Bodhi thought Chirrut was a better choice.”

“Yeah, but now I’m feeling a bit left out. Have you _all_ been working on this without me?”

“We thought you would be better used as a distraction for the Captain,” Chirrut says, knowing exactly what the pilot will like to hear. “You have such a calming and pleasant nature. It would be difficult for you to lie, and easier for you to bear the weight of the Captain’s grief, since it is so closely tied with your own.”

(He doesn’t have to be able to _see_ to know that Bodhi will be flushing with pleasure at having been called calming and pleasant. He also doesn’t have to be able to see to know that Baze will be rolling his eyes.)

“What do you mean she is trying to contact us?” Cassian asks flatly.

“Trying to contact _you_ ,” Chirrut specifies.

“She is communicating with _Draven_ ,” K-2SO says, patient, as if he thinks Chirrut simply forgot what the result of his reconnaissance was.

And Cassian understands, looking at Chirrut’s expression, looking at Baze’s patient body language, looking at the way Bodhi’s stance tenses up as he looks around the room. He understands everything, sees everything where he couldn’t see it before.

“Wait, wait, what?” Bodhi asks, taking a moment of confusion, looking around the room to see if he’s following correctly. “She…is Draven intercepting her messages?”

(There’s a short silence, in which Chirrut can feel Cassian’s doubts struggling to incorporate this new information. But even the strength of Cassian’s self-loathing, even the strength of his belief that Jyn made the right choice in leaving him, even _that_ cannot combat the anger that’s coursing through him now at the thought of Draven’s deception.)

“He’s _keeping_ her away,” Chirrut says, his voice low and firm. He is speaking directly to Cassian. Cassian can tell, because the emphasis is too pointed. _He’s keeping her away. She didn’t leave because of you. Draven did this._

“Well, what…why- why would he do that?” Bodhi asks. “Jyn…she’s…I mean, we’re all…”

Cassian puts a hand on the younger man’s shoulder, shushing him gently, trying to calm his obvious nerves. It also gives him a handy excuse to keep his eyes on the ground as he turns the past month over in his mind, as he runs the past month through the filter of this information.

“He did it to get to me,” he says. “So he could use me, but I don’t know why he’d…”

“So Jyn, what, saves your life after he was going to kill you, and that gets her kicked out? He can’t do that! They wouldn’t have let him do that. Leia, if Leia knew…”

Cassian squeezes Bodhi’s shoulder, giving him a nod and an expression that tells him he understands, that it’s okay, that he can relax.

“I don’t know why she would have gone,” he admits. There are flashes of understanding. There’s the part of her note that had never made sense to him: _isn’t my choice to make_. There’s the sprawled out corpse of Thane in the hallway outside his cell on the Afflictor. There’s Jyn’s teary eyes and the sentence she’d started to say, her fingers curling around his arm, branding him for the past month, her voice wavering on _I don’t want…_. There’s the datapad with his list of crimes, handily stored away. It’s there, waiting for him to piece it all together, but he shoves it away for now. He can’t look at it. “But if…if you all agree, I think we should go find out.”

“ _Of course_ we agree,” Bodhi breathes out, in a rush, one hand gripping his necklace and the other clutching Cassian’s hand on his shoulder. “I mean, right? We agree?”

“I tried to convince Chirrut to find Jyn Erso and bring her home _days_ ago,” K-2SO says, clearly bored with the conversation, heading already to the cockpit.

“She prefers us to stay away,” Chirrut admits, sighing quietly. “And normally, I would respect that. But there is some _reason_ she wants us away from her. She wants us safe. And I think…I _know_ , that I would like very much to be able to protect her, whether she thinks we are needed or not.”

“Draven doesn’t have any _idea_ of the storm that’s coming,” Baze says simply.

Cassian feels a smile forming on his face. Since they met this crew, since he and K-2SO and Jyn put this group together piece by piece, collecting them like spare parts that they didn’t realize they needed to be whole, he has felt that they were _hers_. Chirrut chose to follow _her_. Bodhi, too, first because of Galen and then because of her conviction. Baze called her _little sister_ , back on Scarif, long before he ever even smiled at Cassian a single time. And even now, they’re banding together to rescue her.

But they could have left him. They could have abandoned him to his cause, to Draven, to his doubts and the hopelessness that his relationship with Draven has long made him feel. They could have left him here and taken off after Jyn, and he would have understood. He would have applauded it, probably. But they stayed. They’re _here._

“We’re with you, Captain,” Chirrut says, as if he has read Cassian’s mind (Cassian is, for the record, still not convinced he _can’t_ ).

“All the way,” Baze agrees.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone reading and commenting! I'm still going through and reading and replying to the comments from last chapter! You all have been too good to me! Seriously, thank you for keeping this motivation strong.


	4. You've Done Good Work Here, Sergeant

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Me: I'm going to skip today because the final chapter is barely even in first draft form! Spread out my chapters a little!  
> Also me: *finishes this chapter at 10 PM and posts it anyway*
> 
> This chapter is dedicated to the political hellscape, my anxiety over big personal changes (a really really good one, actually! But my anxious ass can't appreciate it!), and the song Elevator by Platon Karataev, which I listened to on repeat while writing this and the next chapter!

The mining colony of Kazadu was originally supposed to be a temporary workers’ colony. Years past its expiration date, it has finally outlived its usefulness to the Empire except as another territory to hold: a largely depleted source of steel that they can’t afford to give up after losing so much to the Rebels. But the workers weren’t being paid, and they weren’t being allowed to leave, and so protests became riots, became resistance.

Increasing anti-Imperial sentiment led to violent pushback after the Battle of Yavin, and it was no surprise that further Imperial attempts at control were rebuffed. It’s the same story across the galaxy. People who can afford to fight back, or who are so desperate that they have no choice, are using everything they _do_ have to free themselves. It’s exactly what the Rebellion wanted: people have _hope._

 Cassian reads Draven’s report on the fledgling resistance and his arguments as to why it’s a good strategic target for the Rebellion. He reads the reports carefully, with a spy's eye, with the eye of someone who knows Draven well. It’s not necessarily odd for Draven to get so involved in the annexing of an Imperial territory, especially one so conveniently placed on the edge of the Outer Rim. No one higher up would have reason to find fault in it. There would be nothing suspicious in it at all, if only he hadn’t tried to order Leia not to send Rogue One.

 He hates to let the hope grow inside him, unfurling in his chest, sending out tentative feelers along his limbs. The sting of disappointment at this stage would be too much. And yet her presence is in every dry, barren word in this report. The latest push for independence started to roll out with the arrival of a cargo ship several weeks earlier, which aimed to deliver resistance supplies. A determined enough person could have talked a small resistance into existence, especially in a place that had already had its fill of the Empire.

Has Draven been using Jyn as a source? As an intelligence asset? Baze said Jyn was trying to contact him, trying to follow through on the promise she left on the datapad. Did she know that Draven was intercepting her messages? Or did she assume, as Cassian had assumed, that the lack of response simply meant abandonment?

Cassian knows the trick well. Cut off communication. Make the source feel as if they have no choice but to rely on you. Make them feel alone.

His default state of late has been simmering anger, but the more he reads, the more he sees Jyn between the sparsely written lines, the closer it comes to a boil. He remembers the look on Draven’s face when Cassian refused to send Jyn to Geonosis alone. When Cassian claimed her as his asset, not someone to be used by the others. Draven is not a petty man, and yet Cassian can’t help but feel the sting of it, as if all of this was in some way personal.

But even now, he understands the practicality of the decision: Draven needed Cassian in Intelligence, where he could continue to exploit Cassian’s dedication, Cassian’s _programming_ , and the way to do that was to rid him of Jyn. Jyn, who Cassian admired to the point of distraction, to the point of whispered, barely confessed love. Jyn, who had a hold on him that could compete, for the first time since he joined the Rebellion, with the hold that Draven lorded. But Jyn was also a good asset for Draven to have. She’s a good fighter, she’s loyal, and if she truly hadn’t wanted to leave, then that meant that Draven could hold it over her: _if you want to come back, you’ll do this one thing for me._

Cassian closes his eyes to imagine it. Jyn lost, angry, trying to reach out and hearing nothing in return. All he’s ever wanted is to keep her safe. Since he met her, since he’s known her, she’s been this warmth beside him, lighting up corners of him that have been cast in shadow for so long. And all he has done is cause her more hurt. He put her in this position. He may not know the mechanics of it yet, but he knows that Draven only acted the way he did because Jyn interfered on the Afflictor.

_Draven did this._ But Cassian knows _he_ did it as well, somehow. Without meaning to, he gave Draven the tools to harm Jyn. He owes it to her, to all of his crew, to free her from it. His feelings for her have become a liability, just as he feared, but they’re a liability to _her_. He needs to make it right.

_I’ll fix this, Jyn_ , he thinks, and he settles back to read the report one more time.

* * *

Kazadu is a colony spread over six asteroids with artificial atmospheres, and two of them are currently battlegrounds. Bodhi takes Rogue One in hot, following the reinforcements that Draven _actually_ asked for, landing on the platform as directed. Their ship is bigger than most of the fighters and troop transports, so Cassian knows they can’t stay here for long. The rebels will need the space.

“What’s the plan?” Chirrut asks, sensing his hesitation. Cassian bites the inside of his cheek, considers. They’re here for Jyn, but that doesn’t mean these people don’t need their help as well.

“Chirrut and Baze, with me. Bodhi, K, they’ll need assistance shuttling the wounded to one of the safe zones. Think you can handle that?”

“Um,” Bodhi says, looking rattled by the thought. But he nods, swallows his fear. “Yeah. I can do that. It’s just flying.”

“He can handle it,” Chirrut says, reassurance that Cassian didn’t know he needed until the guardian spoke the words. “What would you have us do?”

“Keep me from killing Draven, mostly,” Cassian says, which is only really half a joke. Chirrut smiles.

“I’ll pass,” Baze says.

“If we're going to be here, we should be here,” Cassian says. He elaborates: “we should help them. Three guerilla fighters used to urban warfare could make a big difference. I want to see what I can find out about Jyn first, but I’ll be with you when the fighting starts.”

Chirrut nods, and Baze clasps Cassian on the shoulder with more sincerity than anything he’s ever shown his captain before.

“Thank you,” he says. “I was hoping I would get to kill some Imperials today.”

* * *

As they stalk across the platform, leaving Bodhi and K-2SO in the cargo bay doors negotiating with a resistance leader, offering their shuttle services, Cassian observes the activity around them. There’s a flurry of preparation, rebels and Kazadu workers coming together, trading information and jokes and encouragement. He’s cheered by the size of the force here. The Rebellion reinforcements are scattered about, their numbers dwarfed by the miners in their plain coveralls and their Imperial-issue casualwear.

Cassian feels a proud smile creeping to his face before he can stop it. If he’s right, if she’s here, she has come so far from the woman who had no problem drawing stark parallels between the Empire and the Rebellion. She has inspired a settlement of people to have the courage to look up and challenge their oppressors. This is an operation to be proud of. Even Draven, evidently, has judged it a worthy cause.

He quickly recognizes a squad leader, Captain Maro, who accepts Baze and Chirrut into her group with the enthusiasm they deserve, and who explains the situation in short, efficient sentences. “We’ll be moving out in just under an hour. We’ll be making a final push into the Imperial compound. Kazadu will be ours.” Then, when prompted: “Draven? Just came in from the other outpost. Saw him heading into that shipping warehouse. Headquarters of the resistance effort, I think.”

“Thank you,” Cassian says, moving to go. Chirrut stops him, sticking his staff in the way. “Chirrut…”

“Keep your ears open. You have a difficult choice in front of you.”

“Are you sure you’re not a Jedi?” Cassian asks, quietly suspicious. Chirrut only laughs, retracts his staff.

“Only a man who knows how to read the Force. And this man is telling you to be careful. You will want to react immediately. Do not let yourself be overcome. Approach this as peacefully as possible.”

“Nonsense. Punch him,” Baze counters, shouldering his blaster cannon with a broad grin.

“I’ll try to find something in the middle,” Cassian promises.

* * *

Alone, Cassian makes his way into the warehouse. It’s not just the headquarters, he realizes. It _is_ the resistance. The bottom floor is filled with the injured fighters from the last skirmish, which must have been barely hours ago. Some of them are already being stretchered out to Rogue One on the platform. Battered medical droids and harried personnel push past each other. Most of the wounded aren’t even in beds; they’re pressed together on threadbare blankets and tarps, bandages torn from sheets and undershirts. Rebellion reinforcements pass through, medics taking in the damage with an energy that won’t last long. Past the entrance, the wounded give way to the soldiers, who are passing out new weapons from the reinforcements, barking orders and asking questions and rallying around each other.

Cassian sticks to the shadows, and he looks.

There’s a foolish, romantic notion he has, quickly tramped down, that if she was in here, in this room, he would feel her.

 He’s been spending too much time with Chirrut.

 But a longer examination of the room doesn’t reveal Jyn, or Draven, and he quickly looks for someone who might know.

His eyes settle on a woman who used to be in Intelligence, before she gained the facial scar that made her too recognizable. She’s showing one of the resistance women how to work the launcher she’s holding, and her face goes noticeably rigid when she sees Cassian.

“I need to find Draven,” Cassian says.

“ _Kriff_ , Andor. What are you doing here?”

“Polle.” Warning, eyebrows raised. Suspicious of her hesitation. Does _everyone_ know that Rogue One is supposed to be banned from this mission?

“He’s not going to be happy,” Polle warns. So, yes, apparently. Everyone knows.

“I know he won’t be. That’s why I’m here. The princess sent me with a message.”

“ _As_ a message?” the former spy guesses, and she smirks when Cassian nods. “Force, I like her. He just headed up to the second floor. Meeting with the resistance heads, I think. Cassian...”

“Mm?” Already three steps away. Polle hesitates.

“I’m…I hope…oh, kriff. You’ll find out soon enough.”

But just from that, he already has.

* * *

She and Draven are facing each other in the center of the room, across a rough approximation of the war table that was on Yavin. The second floor has been converted to a command center, old computer parts dragged out and strung together, but they’re dirty and half rust. The Rebellion has an inadequate system as it is. This is almost laughably worse.

But she’s _here_. Jyn is here, mere footsteps away. Bags under her eyes, hair greasy and lank, her mouth moving fast as she looks at the others around the table, hands spread out like a miniature of Mon Mothma, palms flat on the old map in front of them. She’s wearing a baggy shirt, collar hanging open, and the skin beneath is bruised, scraped up. She’s all the way across the room, dozens of people standing between them, but she’s never felt more _real_ to him. Had he really ever been close enough to touch her? Had his lips really touched hers? Had he been _allowed_ to pull her near to him? It doesn’t seem possible now. She feels like something that will slip through his fingers if he tries to get any closer.

The room is dimly lit, and he’s surrounded by people who don’t know him. It’s easy enough to blend with them. He moves closer with all the caution he’s capable of, keeping his eyes on Jyn as much as he can. Cataloguing. Bandage on her palm, scrape on the left side of her neck. What looks like a blaster burn on her forearm, slightly faded. Reckless. _You need to be more careful_. He wants to tell her. Wants to gather her into his arms in front of all of these people, in front of Draven. Press his face into the skin exposed at her shoulder, breathe _you need to be more careful_ into her the way he did on Hoth.

But Chirrut told him to be patient. A choice, he said. _You have a difficult choice in front of you._

Feeling a bit like a child, he turns his back on them, bends over some readouts, trains his ears toward them.

“Anything you can give us will help,” one of the Kazadu resistance women is saying.

Draven, replying, “it’s not much, but it’s all we can spare.”

Jyn silent, undoubtedly fuming.

They burn through the meeting quickly, strike teams having been assigned movements and locations and air support. Jyn argues fiercely for a contingent hanging back near the warehouse to protect the wounded, and Draven backs her up. It’s civil, but for the tension in Jyn's _thank you_. She’s putting on a good front for her fellow fighters, but Cassian can read her eagerness to have them all gone so she can be alone with him.

 Most of the resistance heads scatter, off to their various tasks around the room, most of them taking up posts at the comms stations, headsets on and ready, breaking into chatter in their various languages. Cassian uses the flurry of activity to move closer, lurking against a disused station, blending in with the background. Facing them now. Watching them. Noticing every flicker of expression on Jyn’s face, every miniscule movement and tic. Memorizing her all over again.

Jyn squares off with Draven like she’s facing an enemy, her lip curled, weighing him. Draven waits, expressionless.

“Bit odd you came yourself,” she says finally, breaking first, though she looks dissatisfied with herself for it.

“I wanted to see if the reality of the situation matched up with the reports I was getting. You’ve been keeping busy.”

“You have someone keeping tabs on me, do you?”

“Of course I do. You’ve already proven you can’t be trusted.”

Hurt flashes across her face, and she draws herself up.

“I don’t know what…”

“Did you _really_ think I wouldn’t find out about your attempts to contact Captain Andor?”

At the sound of his own name from Draven's lips, Cassian looks guiltily away, drawing his hands into fists. Jyn's stance oddly mirrors his, though she looks up rather than away, her chin jutting forward, her eyes flashing. A warring mix of guilt and defiance.

Relief, too. Now she knows that she hasn’t been abandoned.

_I would never_ , he wants to tell her. _If I’d received a single message, I would have sent a reply in seconds. I was waiting!_

_Patience_ , Chirrut cautions.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says. Draven gives a small grunt of amusement at that.

“Should have known you left too easily.”

“You should have,” Jyn snaps.

“We talked about this. If you’re starting to waver, maybe I should remind you…”

“I don’t need a _reminder,_ ” Jyn says. It’s painful to hear, painful to watch her try and regain control over her emotions. Scrambling to maintain the higher ground.

Cassian has never wanted so badly to go to someone. He feels even more helpless than he had when she was staggering towards him, wounded, on the Afflictor, his hands bound, unable to touch her. Leia may have had a point about the self-flagellation, but he knows he isn’t wrong for it. This is him, somehow. He did this. He caused this. _He_ hurt her.

“I hope not,” Draven says. It could be warning, but he follows it up with a surprisingly gentle, “you’ve done good work here, Sergeant.”

Jyn looks at him like she wants to tear his heart out, but she swallows it. Suppresses it. She looks so much like Cassian has felt around Draven a thousand times that he has to suppress a shiver.

“I’m not a Sergeant anymore,” she says, quietly. Playing nice. Biding her time. _I did this_ , Cassian reminds himself. “General, actually. Of the Kazadu resistance forces.”

That gets a smile out of Draven. Wry and genuinely amused.

“A lofty title.”

“You can pretend not to be impressed, but I know you are. You wouldn’t have sent anyone if you didn’t think we have a shot. And this would be a good win for the Rebellion. A good outpost for you to have.”

“And then where would you go? _General_.”

Jyn pauses for a long time, staring hatefully at Draven. Cassian wants to take her arm and pull her back. Tell her it’s not worth it. Tell her _leave it_ like he did with that bastard Krennic. But this is not his battle. He may be the genesis of it, but it’s not his. All he can do is watch.

Draven looks concerned. Not mocking. Not returning her fire. He simply looks concerned for her, and that burns deep inside Cassian, because he shouldn’t be allowed to do that. He should be gone already, impersonal and blank. He should not be allowed to show any signs of caring while still doing everything he can to keep her away.

When Jyn speaks, it is with disdain for Draven that leaks through in her words, in her every action. _I know you_ , the sneer says. _You can’t fool me_.

“Onto the next Imperial controlled planet until they stop me or I do your job for you there, too. I don’t have a lot of options.”

“I thought you’d pick up some work and disappear into a new alias. Relish the freedom of choice. Receiving your request for aid was…unexpected.”

“That’s not me anymore, and you know it. I’m different now. You may not want me, but I can still help. Maybe one day I’ll prove you wrong.”

“You already have.”

Draven’s calm assurance seems to make her angrier. Understandable: it makes Cassian’s breath nearly stop. Because this is what Draven _does_.

It would be easier, Cassian thinks, if Draven was the evil man that it’s so easy to see him as. But after years fighting with him, taking his orders, watching him at his lowest points, Cassian _knows_ Draven. Draven does what he does because he cares so deeply. And when he says things like that, when he delivers praise, you _believe_ it. Why wouldn’t you? He isn’t lying.

Jyn stares across the table for so long that Cassian is sure she’s going to leap across it and gauge Draven’s eyes out. But she throws the contest, gives up first.

“Just tell me,” she says, eyes big, resolutely dry.

“They’re fine.”

Jyn keeps looking. She looks like a woman parched but too proud to ask for another sip of water.

“Just fine?”

“What do you expect me to say? You don’t need to hear the gritty details, and I don’t need to deliver them. We both know it wasn’t easy on them. We both know they aren’t happy. That they feel betrayed. Nothing to do about it.”

The resentment on Jyn’s face is strong enough that Cassian almost moves forward, almost goes to hold Draven down _for_ her. But she grips the edge of the table in both hands and looks down at the map, the tension radiating off her shoulders.

“I’ll never forgive you for this,” she says. Bitterness in every syllable.

“I understand that,” Draven replies. Some emotion from Jyn, then, twisting her face into a bitter, ironic smile. Like she can’t quite find the energy to laugh. Draven leans in, leans across the table, making sure she’s paying attention. “Just remember what you’re doing it for, General.”

“I _told_ you. I don’t need a reminder,” she spits back, leaning back, starting to circle around the table towards him. Cassian turns away, pretending to look at something on the station behind him, shoulders hitching up around his neck. He’s terrified, for a moment, that she’s seen him. But she continues speaking. “I assume you didn’t run into any problems explaining it away.”

“Thane went missing on a mission. Sad, but not unexpected. It’s a dangerous line of work. The Council knows that well enough.”

“And Cassian?”

Her voice breaks on his name, and Cassian’s fingernails dig into his palms.

“Cassian knows that better than anyone.” Taking pity on her, Draven answers the actual, intended question. “Cassian is dealing with it the same way he always does.”

Jyn makes a small noise at that. A scoff or something sadder. Cassian can’t really tell.

“You don’t deserve his loyalty,” she says.

“Finally, something we can agree on.”

* * *

Cassian waits until they’ve finished discussing their plans. Draven will take charge of air support. Jyn will be directing the forward forces through the mines, to the Imperial compound. They part with no more or less animosity than they’d started with.

Before she leaves, heading deeper into the second floor, on to some other set of rooms, Jyn grabs her coat from the chair behind the table. _His_ coat. Her small fists grip at it like she wishes it were a blaster instead. Cassian watches her go, and he’s sure his lip is bleeding from biting down to keep from calling out to her.

When Draven leaves, Cassian follows.

His entire being _burns_ to go to Jyn, but he has to know. He has to hear it from Draven.

_It’s not my choice to make_.

After putting her through this, he can’t possibly ask her to do anything more.

He follows Draven back down the stairs, follows him through the soldiers and the wounded, past wide-eyed Polle, who lingers a little bit behind, probably out of curiosity. He follows Draven all the way out to the landing platform, halfway back to his shuttle.

And then: “General!”

When Draven turns, there’s a storm on his face that makes Cassian briefly feel guilty, because half his life has been trying to make this man proud.

“What are you doing here?” Draven asks. He doesn’t do anything so obvious as looking back into the warehouse to see if Jyn’s watching, but Cassian can feel his superior’s attention turned in that direction anyway.

“Leia sent me,” Cassian says, and Draven laughs out a curse.

“Of course she did,” he says. “I’m assuming there’s a message.”

“If I’m not mistaken, I _am_ the message.”

“That you are.”

Draven is looking at him, blank and patient and infuriating. Finally, he says, “you know.”

Cassian allows himself to pause for a moment to consider what to say.

“I don’t know what I know. I know you sent her away. That it wasn’t her choice.”

The blank expression slips enough for Cassian to see that Draven is irritated, but that is no surprise. The older man looks around. Stalling, Cassian thinks. Looking for words that will excuse him, will explain him, will defuse the rapidly escalating tension that’s behind Cassian’s posture. It’s the closest to looking _caught_ that Cassian has ever seen him _._

“Not here,” Draven finally says.

“Why not?”

“We’re in the middle of a warzone, Captain Andor. In case you hadn’t noticed, these people are fighting for their lives.”

He’s right, but Cassian can’t let this go. He follows, every muscle in his body screaming out for him to grab Draven and punch him. He waits only until they’re standing on the ramp of Draven’s shuttle. He knows that Draven will find any excuse to not answer the questions that Cassian has, so Cassian plants his feet and refuses to move.

“You had her lie to us. Had her leave us like it was her choice. Why?”

Draven looks at Cassian with an expression that looks like _sadness_. Acceptance.

_I’ve lost you_ , is what it says.

“You’re an intelligent man. Why do you think?”

The fury that sparks inside Cassian at that condescension almost whites out his vision. Repressing it is a battle, and he can feel his lip curl from the effort.

“You wanted me back,” he guesses. Draven huffs a humorless laugh. “You knew I’d be easier to control if I had nothing to live for.”

“You’ve never been one for such dramatics, Captain Andor.”

Anger, more anger, pushed down again. He swallows it, but it wells inside of him. Anger will not impress or intimidate Draven. It never has.

“What did you tell her?” he asks. “To drive her away. What did you do?”

“You seem to have an idea already.”

“I have several ideas.”

“I’d love to hear them.”

“Would you even tell me the truth? If I guessed correctly?”

Draven looks, incongruously, hurt by that question.

“Am I the type to lie with my back to the corner?”

“Yes.”

Draven laughs bitterly. When he looks down at Cassian, it’s with something like pity. That might be the most infuriating thing of all.

“You were my best operative before Scarif. I could rely on you not to question orders. To get the job done. You understood your place in this war, and you understood your worth.”

He can’t know, he _can’t_ , because he wasn’t there, but there’s something deeply horrifying about how closely Draven’s words mirror the ones that Raleigh said to Jyn on the Afflictor. _They know their worth, or lack thereof._ Just a spy, ready to swallow the suicide pill for the greater good. Life thrown away without question. _You were my best operative_ means _you knew what you were worth, and now you’re broken because you’ve learned to hope for more._

“It wasn’t just Scarif,” he says to quiet the part of his brain that’s sounding more and more like Baze ( _just punch him_ ). “I was unhappy long before Scarif.”

“Before Scarif, you never would have used your _happiness_ as an argument,” Draven points out. He doesn’t even sound angry. Maybe if he did, it would be easier. But Draven just sounds disappointed. Worn down. Exhausted by the whole thing. He sounds _finished._ “You were fading. Wasting your talent on missions Erso could have led on her own. That Star Destroyer should have been a simple task, and you failed. Thane should have silenced you, your team should have been reassigned, and your name should have been remembered as one of the finest Intelligence operatives this Rebellion ever saw. Provided any of us survive this blasted war to remember you by. But Erso couldn’t let it slide, and instead she killed Thane. An operative who was actually of use to me. So I told her to get out, because I needed to salvage what I could. You’re not Thane, not anymore. But you’re still better than most, and I had hopes that you could be great again.”

Stinging, all over, from the barbs that Draven is hurling with almost casual disinterest towards him, Cassian manages to ask, “and she left? Just like that.”

“You want me to spell it out for you, boy? Your team was finished. Mothma and Organa would have asked the right questions, and Erso would have answered them. You and I both know they aren’t ready to know what men like you and Thane have done for the Rebellion. They would have dragged us all through the mud until they thought their hands were clean. Easy enough to persuade Erso of that, even if she continues to be a pain on everything else.”

_It isn’t my choice to make._

“You told her that exposing you would mean exposing me.”

“Yes.”

No apology. Nothing but daring.

“ _Why_?”

“Because I don’t have time to wait around for my operatives to sort out their personal feelings,” Draven says. It’s the first sign he’s shown of cracking, of emotion, of anger. And it rankles on Cassian. He takes a step forward as if to strike him, but Draven’s expression remains as disgusted, as disappointed as ever. “Look at you. Sulking around for a month and now you think, what, you’ll guilt me into apologizing for this? I don’t need you to tell me it was badly done, Andor. I don’t need you to call me a monster. Erso got there first, and it hardly left a dent. You know me better than that. I know it probably doesn’t mean much now, but I was trying to save you the pain of having to make this choice. I was trying to bring you back.”

_Bring you back._ The sound that escapes from Cassian at that is hardly a laugh, but it’s close. The idea makes him sick.

Because it worked. It _worked._ If Leia hadn’t sent him here, how far would he have been to reverting completely back into that former Cassian, the Cassian who would do _anything_ Draven asked?

“I don’t think you’ll be getting me back,” he says, the words a violent, painful thing.

“No,” Draven admits. There was a time that Draven’s discontent would have struck Cassian dumb. Now, it feels liberating. “I expect not. And we can decide what to do about that later, but for now, I need to do my duty. And you need to do yours.”

_If you’re still capable_ is implied in his every syllable.

There was a time when Cassian would have risen to that challenge. It changes something fundamental inside him to realize that he can’t anymore.

_Duty_ means something else to him now. It means some _one_ else.

Cassian knows, as he turns and walks out of the shuttle, back onto the landing pad, staring up at the resistance headquarters where Jyn is waiting, that there isn’t going to be any ‘later’ with Draven. Useless, broken. A spy without a purpose. He and the Rebellion have always needed each other, but now he finds himself in a position of needing something that doesn’t need him in return.

No matter what happens today on Kazadu, no matter what happens when he works up the courage to face Jyn, Cassian knows he isn’t going back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This time I MIGHT mean it when I say it might take me a couple days for the next chapter! 
> 
> Thank you all for your comments! I posted the last chapter pretty close to bedtime, so it was great to wake up and get to read everyone's thoughts on a chapter I was so nervous about! Y'all are seriously the best!


	5. You Would Have Us

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was supposed to be the last chapter, but it reached almost 8000 words, and that's just absurd. So consider this a two-part mission finale: this chapter posted now, and the second chapter posted in a few hours, once I'm satisfied with it! 
> 
> Thank you to everyone reading and commenting! The amount of people who have commented and said that they've binge-read the whole thing recently is really awesome! And major props, because this series is long as hell!

_It isn’t my choice to make._

Cassian stands in front of the warehouse, looking up at it, watching the medics and the soldiers bustling, passing off weapons and the wounded. He stands there for far too long before he has to accept that he isn’t going in.

She was right. It’s not her choice. It’s his. He just has to figure out what he’s choosing between.

Draven could be bluffing about turning the evidence over to Leia and Mon Mothma. In fact, he probably is. There would be no gain in it, at this stage. Using it as something to hold over Jyn is one thing, but actually doing it? It isn’t Draven's style to torpedo his entire career for the sake of a spiteful action.

But still. _Still_. Cassian can’t imagine risking it. Going back there with Draven looming over everything. His tone, his words, it was all so final. But if Draven thought there was a chance Cassian could still be used, he would take it. And Cassian has proven to himself by now that he can’t be trusted not to fold. Even a broken spy has its uses to a man like Draven.

But Jyn. She belongs in the Rebellion. Belongs standing beside Mon Mothma, Leia, Luke. They’re the heroes that people want. When the stories of the Rebellion are passed down, they’ll be the ones at the center. She belongs in a role like this. Leading. Inspiring. It’s not _her_ anymore to stand by while the galaxy wars around her. She'll want to go back. He wants her to go back. But he can’t go back with her.

_She deserves the chance to make her own choice_. It’s no less true than it used to be. But after all he’s put her through, Cassian is loath to ask her for something else. He’s loath to stand in front of her, a shadow of the man he was, admitting his failures and yet asking her in the same breath if he’s enough for her.

Draven was right about one thing (he was right about a lot of things, but one thing more particularly than all the rest). Cassian isn’t the person he used to be. He takes none of the pleasure he used to in the job. In the Rebellion. In _anything_. He’s been used too many times and has outlived it.

He should have died on Scarif. He should have died on the Afflictor.

If he walks away now, she can go back without his crimes hanging over her, ripe for blackmail. She can stay there, unburdened by him. Unburdened by a spy who can no longer be the tool he was crafted into.

_She deserves the chance to make her own choice._

She deserves _better_.

* * *

“You’re an even bigger fool than I took you for.”

Cassian just shoulders his weapon, looking down the sights. Adjusting. Chirrut waits patiently enough. That in itself is annoying, because it isn’t as if Cassian has _decided_ anything. And yet he had barely regrouped with the guardians before Chirrut was leaning into his space, glaring as if he’d already announced his intentions.

Finally, Cassian says, “isn’t there a saying about that? Fools and the fools who follow them?”

“You are so close. She’s right _there_.”

Chirrut points back towards the warehouse, visible over the tops of the freighter crates that block them from view, here at what will soon be the front lines of the push to the Imperial compound. Cassian doesn’t want to look. He can pretend she isn’t there if he doesn’t look. He faces forward instead. Someone, long ago, carved a narrow path, roughly wide enough for ten people to walk abreast, into the asteroid in front of them. It’s open to the artificial sky above, making it a perfect place for X-wings and Y-wings to do their bombing runs on the approaching troopers. There are plenty of places to hide in the poorly-shorn rock, plenty of outcroppings and winding paths to other areas, cut out of convenience. It’s a good place to make a stand, but it still feels like marching straight into a trap. He hopes the Kazadu miners are as competent as they seem.

“ _Captain_ ,” Chirrut says, whacking Cassian on the back of his arm.

“Stop that! She’s running an operation. She doesn’t have time for this.”

“A coward’s excuse.” But that doesn’t bother Cassian as much as it might have once, because he knows it isn’t cowardice. Cowardice would have him charging into that war room without a second thought, demanding that she choose. Cowardice would be allowing his emotions, his fear, his love to overpower all sense. Cowardice, and selfishness, too. His acceptance seems to infuriate Chirrut more. “What happened to you? The fire inside you is caged now with the rest of it.”

“I need time,” Cassian says simply. He’s calmer than he would have thought. “To decide what to do.”

“Time is the one thing I cannot give you,” Chirrut says. “But if you think you’re doing her any favors by dragging this out, you aren’t. You may not see your own worth, Captain Andor, but she does.  Talk to her. Let her make her own decisions. Let her know how you feel.”

“I _feel_ like this is an absurd conversation to be having right now.”

Chirrut sighs, looks sympathetic through the frustration that is the overriding emotion.

“I understand why you’re hesitant. I understand that you feel you do not have a place to go, and you would not condemn her to the same fate for the sake of a personal connection. If it wasn’t love, I might agree with you. But I know how the matters of the heart work.”

“This would be the worst conversation I’ve had today, if only Draven hadn’t beaten you to it,” Cassian mutters. He refuses to look at Chirrut again.

Baze, laconic as ever, not even looking up from cleaning his gun, says, “I want you to know that I told him not to pester you.”

Suspicious, Cassian replies, “I appreciate that.”

“But even I think you’re being ridiculous.”

“Great. Thank you. What is this? What do you two think you’re going to achieve, here? What is the point of this? You want me to explain everything I’m thinking? Because I’m not doing that.”

Chirrut laughs. It’s oddly bitter, for him.

“I don’t need you to explain anything. I know exactly what you are feeling. Inadequate. Lost. She felt it when we came back from Scarif and she realized that home to you wasn’t quite the same as home to her. She felt it when you left without telling her why you were doing it. And you. You have been feeling the same pain since she left you and you assumed you understood why. I’ve been telling you from the beginning that you were wrong, but I know that isn’t always enough. It’s difficult for you to believe a good thing about yourself, Captain. I know that, too. And it’s difficult for you to see that she misses you terribly. That your leaving would help no one. That even now, as you contemplate the idea of leaving the Rebellion rather than drag us down with you, you’re missing the obvious. Together, Captain. We belong together. We survived Scarif _together_. We saved the entire galaxy! And how did we do it, Baze?”

“Together,” the bigger man grumbles, irritated to be dragged into this speech.

“That’s right. Together. If you aim to leave, we will all of us be joining you. Jyn included.”

Cassian looks down at his hands. There’s something uniquely humiliating about having your inner thoughts laid bare like they’re nothing more mysterious than a simple children’s story.

“If I leave the Rebellion, I will have nothing,” Cassian says, but he knows even as he says it that it’s a woefully inadequate excuse. Chirrut does him the courtesy of pretending not to think so.

“You would have us,” he says.

* * *

The battle is a messy one, like most battles are. The Stormtroopers march in formation, and though the rebels and the miners are fewer, they’re more adaptable, not so rigid, and they flow easily from one place to another.

Jyn's allies, for all their inexperience in leading revolutions, are surprisingly adept at executing them. And Jyn's influence is everywhere. Jyn's Partisan upbringing, the guerilla tactics. Squads assigned to the ground burst from behind hiding places, overlapping with other groups, taking the regimented Stormtroopers by surprise. Individuals loaded down with rockets climb onto cargo crates that are stacked twenty feet in the air, firing at the oncoming opposition.

Over the comlink in his ear, Cassian hears her voice. Shouting orders, barking for reinforcements. He doesn’t let it distract him. He focuses only on the sights of his rifle and the poor bastards who wander in front of it. He counts them off in his head, letting everything else fall away.

The X-wings and Y-wings bomb the Imperial compound. It’s a tall building enclosed in a walled-in, stockpiled courtyard, all of it hewn from the rock of the asteroid. Captain Maro’s squadron is almost upon the wall when the bombs drop, and the resulting explosions are a bit too close to comfort, and Cassian takes a burn on the neck from a Stormtrooper in the resulting chaos, but he hardly feels it. He switches his rifle from the sniper configuration and follows the whirling flash of Chirrut's robes, holding off any Stormtroopers who charge out of the smoke to engage. The comlink buzzes with updates from the forces moving through the mines, intent on circling around and preventing the troopers from retreating. Sometimes Jyn, sometimes one of the other generals. Shouted requests and warnings. It doesn’t seem quite real. It’s got a certain faraway quality to it, like it’s happening on some other planet.

Cassian is a spy. Has been a spy for almost as long as he can remember. That means staying out of the action whenever you can. The haze of battle isn’t entirely foreign, but he’s been in the thick of it few enough times in his life that it feels unfamiliar now, charging through the smoke and flame, along this narrow corridor through the rock.

They come to an intersection of two paths, an open space that has to be crossed. He stumbles against cover, sets his rifle up against it, begins to fire. Around him, soldiers and miners fight, fall, scream themselves hoarse to be heard over the sounds of fighting. He holds off the troopers as best as he can, picking them off when they emerge from the smoke. They’re so close now, so close to the compound. It’s almost over.

Cassian becomes aware of the low, pulsing pain in his leg, the burn on the side of his neck, the pain in his back from his Scarif injury flaring up.

_Useless_ , says Draven in his mind. _Broken_. But at least he can still do this.

_Until the chances are spent_.

Maybe later he will admit to himself that he wasn’t in the best frame of mind to go charging into battle. Maybe he will admit that he saw nothing in front of him anyway: no future for a spy without a home. Maybe he will admit that he should have died long ago, and that his borrowed time has stopped feeling earned, stopped feeling like the blessing it felt to be at first.

He’s _tired._

But in the moment, it’s not about any of that. Baze takes a shot to the leg, close range, and Cassian reacts.

It only goes as wrong as it does because of a series of coincidences: his rifle misfires, jams. He pulls out his pistol, but a second Stormtrooper slams into him by accident, thrown off-balance by the tornado of Chirrut’s fighting. Cassian is scrambling out of their way, trying to wrest away the trooper’s blaster rifle, when Chirrut comes close enough to try and help Baze. But Chirrut is surrounded, fighting too many.

“Captain!” he shouts, and it’s an explanation as much as it is an entreaty for aid. Cassian heaves the trooper away, pistol raised, but the one who shot Baze is already facing him, and they shoot at the same time.

The shot hits Cassian on the hip, deep in his bone, and he’s falling before he even registers it, landing hard on his side.

His own shot flies true, blasting a hole in the trooper's chest.

Cassian rolls onto his back, instinct telling him the second trooper is behind him, and he fires up at them, managing to put them down just as they’ve gotten back up.

Pain, then, allowed to register, and Cassian presses his fingers to the wound, hissing.

_On your feet_.

“Captain!” again, from out of the smoke. A second bombing run whites out the world, sends more smoke spinning into the air, the heat of it rolling over him. Rock and debris raining down. He’s coughing, trying to find the motivation to sit up.

_It hurts_ , says a voice in his head. A younger voice, a smaller voice. Some half-formed memory. His mother’s face, smiling, her eyes sad. She says, _I know, sweetheart._

“Delay bombing of compound!” someone hollers into the comlink. Polle, he thinks. “Something’s coming from the northwest path. Everyone get inside the walls! Confirm?”

“Confirm,” says Draven, calm and clear. “Bombers hold back. Reinforcements?”

“I can’t see it through the smoke, but something…” the comlink turns to static, a screeching, whining sound. Captain Maro’s voice cuts in and out, garbled, says “…firing!”

The world rumbles, green light.

_No, no, no, it can’t be_ , he thinks, and of course it’s can’t. The Death Star is gone. This isn’t Jedha. This _isn’t Jedha._ But there’s something out there, through the smoke, firing. Green bolts, stronger than a blaster, stronger than even a blaster cannon, firing slowly, methodically. Shaking the world and blasting away rebels who try to run for cover. Cassian twists his head, still on his back. The world behind him is upside-down, but he spots Chirrut and Baze, crouched behind a small rock wall, the blind guardian putting pressure on Baze’s wound, covering one ear with one hand, shouting something…

“Get to the compound! Go!” someone’s shouting. Miners and rebels pushing past. Cassian’s left on the ground with the dead and wounded, and he has to get up.

_On your feet_.

He’s done enough, hasn’t he? He’s done enough.

But he hasn’t seen her. She doesn’t know. She…

He has to get up.

He tries, his pain coming out of him in a shout, even _sitting_ proving more difficult than he expected. He curls into himself, using his elbow to prop himself up, trying to gain enough momentum to get past the fire in his hip.

For a moment, he’s at the bottom of the databank tower again. _Jyn. Where’s Jyn? I fell…_

“A tank!” Polle’s comlink-distorted voice yells. “It’s a tank!”

“Everyone to the compound!” Someone else, mouth too close to the comlink, their breath loud and ragged.

He’s not on Scarif. This isn’t Scarif.

“Captain!”

Finally, the fog leaves his mind, and he finds the energy to push himself up. To his knees. Then his feet. Baze and Chirrut, beckoning to him, across the way. He takes a step, but his leg buckles, and he goes down to one knee, crying out. Chirrut is torn, already weighed down by Baze, and Baze is struggling to stand on his own, trying to urge Chirrut to go to Cassian, and there isn’t any time. The tank fires again, and there’s no one left out here but the three of them, the tank getting closer with every second they waste. But he’ll never make it across the space between them. Not in this shape. Not with the tank so close.

“Get to the compound!” he yells. Chirrut hesitates. “Go!”

He pushes himself back up, back to his feet, staggering against the rock wall beside him, and he hears it. The rolling, clanking sounds of the tank.

And over that, somewhere distant, the approach of the bombing run. Cassian peers around the corner of his cover, and he finally sees it, the tank unguarded by ground soldiers. Baze and Chirrut disappear into the smoke, headed for the compound. They’ll make it in time. But will the bombers be able to stop the tank? Without risking the fighters in the compound?

He would have said he had nothing left, and yet here he is, clawing at the rocks beside him, dragging himself on one leg, around the corner.

One wounded man, sticking close to the wall, so covered in dirt and blood that he must look a part of the asteroid itself, doesn’t register with whoever’s driving the tank. It keeps going down this corridor, just wide enough for it to pass through, and Cassian waits.

He waits until it’s half past him, and then he pulls himself up onto it, his chipped and bleeding fingers doing most of the work, keeping hold on the rough exterior of the Imperial vehicle. He braces his wounded knee against the gunner's turret, currently empty, trying to keep his balance as the tank turns, as abruptly as a tank can turn, toward the compound.  

It’s as expected, but it sparks a panic in his heart anyway. If this tank gets any closer, it will trap the contingent of rebels and miners between the Stormtroopers within and the tank without. Cassian isn’t sure how much longer the troops through the mines are going to take to reach the other side of the compound. He isn’t sure if this is too close for a bombing run to be successful. They’re inaccurate at best, and Baze and Chirrut are in there. The fighters are in there. It’s too risky. Overhead, the X-wings and Y-wings are turning around to get back into position.

Fumbling with his comlink, fingers sweat-slick and black with smoke, Cassian shouts, “hold on the bombs! The tank is too close to the compound!”

Something garbled comes out of the comlink. He can’t understand it, except the final word: _tank._ He braces himself, wrenches the gunner hatch open. He pulls a thermal detonator from his belt.

The Stormtrooper pops up just as he’s about to toss the grenade in. Surprised, Cassian manages to turn his head, most of the intended blow glancing off his cheekbone, but it still wrenches his knee as he tries to wriggle free, and the trooper knocks him into his back with a second punch.

“Sir, he’s right. It’s too close!” Captain Maro’s voice. “And Andor’s on the tank!”

“Abort!” Draven now, and the fighters scream overhead, dropping nothing.

There’s still time.

“Get him out of there!” someone else yells on the comlink. The trooper emerges out through the hatch, walking across the surface of the tank as if it’s nothing. Cassian slides back, still clinging to the detonator, trying to pull his pistol from his holster. He manages to jerk away from the first attempted stomp to his chest, but his breath is jettisoned by the second, the heavy Stormtrooper boot compressing his ribs, cracking them. He yells, fingers of one hand useless, still clamped around the grenade.

“He’s fucked, someone cover him!” Polle shouts, but the tank fires again, the green bolt exploding a piece of the compound wall to dust. “Taking fire! Taking fire!”

“Maro! Get your people away from the walls!” Draven yells. “We don’t have a choice. That tank will kill all of you if we don’t. Andor, get off the tank!”

“I can’t see him! He’s…”

More nonsense, garbled words, the signal fading. With his other arm, Cassian manages to free his pistol from its holster, shooting jaggedly up at the trooper, catching them somewhere in their armor, sending them careening off the tank with a shout.

“Status on the tank? Coming ‘round again,” says a pilot, and Cassian can hear the fighters ahead, lost in the smoke and haze. His fingers clamp on his comlink.

“I’ve got the tank,” he says, his voice gravel, rock. He crawls back up, drops the grenade into the open hatch. Swings the hatch closed.

He has to move, knows he has to move, would ideally leap off the tank and roll, back behind cover. But he can barely manage to flop, falling from the side of the tank gracelessly. He barely pushes himself up onto his knees before the grenade blows, muted by the tank's armor. It shrieks, metal tearing, gears grinding, but the shrapnel is contained, and the tank comes to a stop.

“Imp reinforcements from the southeast,” someone says into the comlink.

“Divert bombers to southeast corridor!” Draven orders.

_It’s over_ , Cassian thinks, one arm tight around his ribs. He can’t find the energy to stand. _They’re safe._

“The tank?” someone asks.

“It’s stopped!” Captain Maro says. The sounds of fighting on her channel are less, now. He can hear cheering. _We won._ “He got it.”

“Copy. Reinforcements moving in from the warehouse now. Hold that compound, Captain.”

“Cassian?” Jyn's voice, a trembling question, a request for information, a held-breath entreaty. Louder: “does anyone have Cassian?”

“Here,” says Polle, both over the comlink and behind him somewhere, approaching quickly. “He’s breathing, the kriffing idiot.”


	6. Rogues Again

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As promised, here's Mission Finale Part 2!

Draven’s bombing runs take out the reinforcements to the southeast, and the forces in the mines cut off any attempts at retreat, rounding up the remaining Stormtroopers. By the time Polle and one of her lieutenants manage to help Cassian limp to the wall surrounding the compound, it’s over.

“There he is,” Baze grumbles, balancing himself on Chirrut's shoulder, pretending at casual even though his eyes are tight with pain. Chirrut steers them in the right direction, shedding Baze when he gets close and reaching to take Cassian’s weight instead. Polle hands him off, and Cassian lets out a quiet, surprised sound when Chirrut's presumed offer of assistance turns into a desperate hug.

“You foolish boy,” Chirrut says, pulling back, and Cassian laughs, relieved, pained, barely audible. “You could have been killed. What were you thinking?”

“I wasn’t,” Cassian admits. “Instinct.”

“Ignore him. That was _beautiful_ ,” Baze says. Chirrut scoffs, persisting through Cassian’s weak attempts to bat him away, to get him to stop feeling his face for injury.

“This is why we never had children. Imagine how they would have been raised.”

“Exactly like this,” Baze points out. “And we swore an oath, remember? The temple was our child. _That’s_ why we don’t have any.”

“Pfft. There are loopholes. Will you sit down? You’ll hurt your leg more. All the complaining you do about me not taking care of myself, and you act like this about a serious injury.”

“Serious injury,” Baze says with a disbelieving snort. “At worst, it’s a scrape.”

It looks pretty badly burned, by Cassian’s estimation. But Baze is sending him a warning, withering glare, and Cassian has never seen Chirrut so worried, so doesn’t say that.

“Stay here and watch him,” Chirrut says, as if _he’s_ the Captain, and he stalks off into the crowd of wounded rebels to find a medic. Cassian sighs and leans against the wall beside Baze. Mopping pointlessly at blood on his neck with the collar of his tan shirt, already stained.

The captured and wounded Stormtroopers are being gathered in the center, more of them marching in at every moment. It’s a big win for the Rebellion. Between the prisoners, the asteroids, the easily-defensible location…Cassian feels a kind of bitterness to be standing here, even as he feels pride.

“Have you decided?” Baze asks.

It almost feels like a betrayal for Baze to break the silence, for him to ask Cassian about this, because Baze is usually the one he doesn’t have to worry about.

“I don’t know if there’s anything to decide,” Cassian admits.

He has lived for nothing but the Rebellion for so long. He’s not sure he exists without it. But he still can’t bring himself to go back. Not after that conversation with Draven. Not after what Draven did.

Cassian isn’t the spy he used to be. He isn’t the _man_ he used to be. The weight of the things he’s done has hung over his head for too long for him to continue to bow under it without breaking. And to go back there, the promise of exposure still hanging over his head. The fear of Leia and Mon Mothma looking at him with barely contained disgust and understanding and _pity_. He can’t do it.

“What about us?” Baze asks. Still gruff, but quiet, oddly gentle.

“They’ll take you back. Jyn, too.”

“You think?” Baze is looking at him doubtfully, and Cassian starts to argue his position, but Baze holds up his hand. “I mean, do you really think we would go without you?”

His heart clenches around that sentiment, but he shakes his head.

“You’ll have to. I’m not going back, Baze.”

The words crystalize, finalize. _I’m not going back._

He exhales slowly, breath shaking with the revelation of it. He has no idea where he’s going to go. He doesn’t even know how he’s going to get there. But there’s a freedom to it, in some way. He’s not going back.

“Then we aren’t going back either.”

Cassian sighs. Instantly regrets it, because his ribs sparkle painfully in his chest. The more he stands here, the more his pain has a chance to set in, the more exhausted he feels.

Twenty years. Twenty years, and it has come to this.

“Baze, I can’t ask…”

“You should know by now that you don’t have to.”

Cassian thinks of Chirrut sparring with Luke in the hanger on Yavin. He thinks of Baze with his heavy repeater cannon, shooting off rounds to the cheers of the younger recruits. Bodhi flying, Bodhi buzzing around the hanger, performing promised maintenance on the X-wings of pilots who have gradually grown to accept him. Jyn finding herself in the corridors of Alpha, finding purpose in the wiring of the comms stations, in the engineers and scientists who clapped her on the back and laughed with her and appreciated her.

“I can’t go back,” he repeats. Hugs himself, arms pulled tight around his screaming ribs, one hand pressing into his hip, staunching the bleeding. “But that doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice everything for me. That’s not what I want.”

“Of course it isn’t. Doesn’t mean we won’t do it.”

Baze is looking at Cassian with something so fond, so _fatherly_ , that Cassian has to look down at the ground to avoid it. He feels the shame of having put his friends in this position.

A brief, dark thought: maybe he _should_ have given up and let the tank take him.

But no, no. When it came time, he wasn’t ready to die. He still isn’t. Easier, maybe. For all of them. But…

“Maybe _she_ will be able to convince you,” Baze says, quietly, and Cassian looks up at him to see that Baze isn’t quite looking back at him. Is looking _past_ him, over his shoulder. Cassian turns.

She’s _here_. She’s got mud smeared across her forehead, soot staining her fingertips as she curls her fingers into fists, and her eyes are bright, _wet_ , trained on him.

Cassian hardly sees Chirrut standing beside her, smiling serenely, pointedly, a little smugly. It’s all he can do to keep breathing.

“Maybe my leg _does_ hurt,” Baze decides, clapping Cassian on the shoulder. Cassian winces a bit, peeling his attention from Jyn with a reluctance that the older man gives a fond chuckle to see. “Take my advice. From years of personal experience. Don’t throw away something good because you’re afraid of what you’ll do to it. She can take care of herself.”

Cassian doesn’t know what to say to that, so he asks, “from personal experience?”

“He said the same thing to me. Lucky for all of us, I listened.”

Baze goes, then. Cassian wants to argue that it’s not the same, wants to open himself up and show Baze the things that he’s done. Surely the former guardian wouldn’t look at him like that if he knew. Surely Baze would do all he could to keep him away from her.

Then again, Jyn knows. Jyn has seen some of the worst things. And she’s still looking at him like…

It’s hard to describe. Hard to _tell_ , really. She’s looking at him like she did on the platform on Scarif again. The way she looked at him in the elevator, when he could have kissed her and didn’t. A promise of _want._

She greets Baze with a hug and a reprimand that Cassian can’t hear, clearly concerned about his leg. Baze again pretends it isn’t as bad as it is. Jyn watches them go, and Cassian watches her.

It’s only when the guardians are safely loaded into a small landspeeder, headed back towards the warehouse, that she looks at him. She walks towards him.

A thousand words are boiling in his mouth. _I’m sorry. Forgive me. You should go. I can’t go back. Draven said…I saw you. I heard you. I’m sorry. This shouldn’t have happened to you. This is my fault. This is my fault. This is my fault._

She’s closer now, closer than she’s been in a month, and his vision is swimming, his breath ragged. He sees the reflection of his own thoughts on her face. _I’m sorry. I left. I didn’t tell you._

“Cassian, I…” she says, stopping a few feet back, too far away. But she pauses, her words freezing inside her, and Cassian doesn’t wait.

He surges forward, and he takes her face in his hands, and he crushes his lips to hers.

Gasping into his mouth, Jyn wastes no time, leaves no room for misunderstanding. Her arms are around him, her fingernails curling into the base of his neck, trying to gain some kind of purchase, trying to take him apart, trying to pull him closer. She kisses him with a hunger that he’s felt every day since he stood toe-to-toe with her after Eadu.

_Welcome home. Welcome home._

“I’m sorry,” he breathes into the skin of her throat, mouth marking a trail of apologies on her, drinking in the smell of battle on her neck, forgetting the pain in his ribs and the pain in his hip and the fact that he’s barely standing. His knee trembles, threatens to buckle, but he isn’t finished, he isn’t _finished_. “I’m so sorry, Jyn, I…”

“I didn’t mean any of it,” she says, and she pulls back far enough, her lips swollen and her eyes fuzzy, unfocused, dazed. “Cassian, I didn’t…”

But she loses the thread, and she pulls him into her, nose pressed against his pulse, and he spreads his hand across her back, twists his fingers into her shirt. He’s never needed words less than he does right now. This is explanation, apology, promise enough.

But… _I can’t go back_.

“Jyn,” he says, needing to tell her. But it comes out strangled, gasped, and she’s alarmed.

“Okay,” she says, her palm resting against his heart, pulling back a little to look at him, to take in the injuries she hadn’t catalogued until now. “Okay. Cassian, come on. We need to get you to some help.”

“I can’t go back, Jyn,” he says. And his knee _does_ buckle then, pitching him forward. He catches himself on the wall beside him, gasping out a Festian curse, and she’s there, shoring him up, helping him.

_I’m not going back._

“Here, lean on me,” she says, but she’s so far away. “Cassian?” He can see the ship, Rogue One. Getting smaller and smaller as it takes off and leaves him, fading into the stars. “ _Cassian_!” Leaves him standing there watching, alone.

* * *

His eyes open heavily, the lids seeming to drag downwards, exhausted. The view isn’t the field of stars from his dreams, with Rogue One vanishing into them. It’s a water-damaged, concrete ceiling. It smells like disuse and metal filings.

He manages to focus his vision, to turn his head to the side, and his breath catches when he sees Jyn. She’s sitting just beside him, on the floor, her back propped up against the low-to-the-ground bed he’s lying in. Her knees are bent in front of her as she reads something off a datapad, and she’s playing with the ends of her hair that have fallen out of her bun. They’re in a small, square room. His blue coat is hanging by the door. _Her room. This is hers._

He’s got the weightless, floating feeling of painkillers in his blood, and he lets himself drift there for a little while, just looking.

He’s smiling, he realizes. Without meaning to.

His arm aches when he moves it, but he slides it across the bedspread slowly, his fingertips brushing against her shoulder. She doesn’t startle, doesn’t curse at him the way he was half expecting her to. She exhales heavily instead, head dipping down, exposing more of the back of her neck, and she reaches one hand up, wrapping her fingers around his without looking at him. Her head tilts to the side, her cheek rubbing against the back of his hand, soft against his knuckles. He swallows, and he wishes that he was stronger than this, but he isn’t. His eyes are filling with moisture just from this tiny act of affection.

“You’re okay,” she tells him, and finally she turns to look at him, tucking her legs under her, still holding onto his hand. She falters when she sees the way he’s looking at her, and he wonders what exactly she sees. What exactly she thinks of him when she sees him lying here, knowing what he’s done. She’s looking at him like she had never learned anything bad about him at all.

“Is everyone else…?”

“Baze is recovering on the ship. He didn’t like the medical droids poking at him, and K promised not to give a shit whether he was in pain or not.”

He laughs a little, a quiet exhale, and it makes Jyn smile back at him. She releases his hand finally, pushes herself up onto her knees so she can pull back the blanket draped over him, eyes narrowed in concentration as she prods at the bandage on his hip. His chest is wrapped tightly, his shirt gone, and he’s sure his ribs would be killing him if he hadn’t been dosed with something strong, but he’s distracted by the smell of her damp hair, fresh and sweet, as she bends over him.

He almost touches it, but that doesn’t seem right. He lets his hands stay by his side, waits for her deliberation.

“You bled through the first bandage,” she explains, pulling back, looking at him steadily, still kneeling beside the bed, looming above him. She bites her lip, and he has a sudden memory of kissing her.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and she lets out a laugh that twists something sharp into him.

“Cassian, if you apologize to me one more time, you’re going to need more than a bandage to keep you together. This wasn’t your fault.”

“But I…”

“Draven saw an opportunity to salvage what he could. He took it. He used both of us to do it. It’s not your fault.”

She looks at him with so much conviction that he can almost believe it, for a moment.

“The datapad,” he says weakly, and she shakes her head.

“I don’t care about that, Cassian.”

He grimaces at that, shifts in the bed to make himself more comfortable, tearing his eyes away from her to look back at the ceiling.

“Did you mean it?” she asks quietly. And when he looks back at her, her eyes are shining again. At least, he thinks they are. It’s difficult to tell through the blur of his own untimely tears. “You said…and Baze told me…you’re not going back?”

He draws a shuddering breath that sparks something close to pain in his ribs, dulled by the drugs but raw enough to feel more real than the rest of this.

“I can’t,” he says, his voice breaking in a way he didn’t quite expect. Jyn’s still biting her lip, expression fierce and impossible to read. “I can’t go back. Either Draven will tell them, or he won’t, and he’ll have it over my head. And I can’t…I can’t go back to killing for him. He almost had me. Almost convinced me…” he shakes his head, looks away from her, as if she won’t be able to tell how close he is to losing it if he’s turned his gaze. Her fingers brush over the bandages on his chest, absent and soothing, sending fire straight to his heart. He swallows, calms himself, continues. “I’m no use to any of you anyway. I can’t…I’m not who I used to be. I can’t do it anymore.”

“How can you _say_ that?” she hisses. He looks up at her, wants to smooth the furrowed line between her brows.

“Jyn, I…”

“You took out an Imperial tank with a single grenade, Cassian. You speak more languages than even Bodhi. You have a million contacts and you can make people trust you with a _word_. You are every bit the spy you used to be. You aren’t a machine. You aren’t…” a sharp, inhaled breath, and her fingers spasm slightly on his bandages. “You aren’t a Stormtrooper. If Draven thinks we broke you, if he thinks _I_ broke you...”

“You didn’t,” Cassian says, unable to let that thought stand.

“I know I didn’t. But Draven thinks…”

“It doesn’t matter what Draven thinks. You _saved_ me.” He says it aloud, and it immediately sounds ridiculous, and it also immediately sounds true. Jyn retracts her hand, looks down at him with shock, as if he’s said something much more damning. _Did_ he? For a second, he isn’t sure. Did _you saved me_ come out as _I love you_ , or did his voice just give him away? Giving the three words an alternate meaning that couldn’t help but be there?

Some of his distress must show on his face, because her own expression crumbles. She lowers herself, her elbows braced on the bed beside him, her hands clasped in front of her face.

It takes a moment, but finally she says, “Chirrut said…he said you didn’t think you would survive the battle. He said you weren’t sure if you wanted to.”

Cassian laughs. He can’t help it. There’s a part of him that wants to say, _I haven’t been sure I’ve wanted to survive_ any _day since I was six years old._

Instead, he says, “Chirrut was being dramatic.”

“As dramatic as he is, there’s usually some truth to what he says.”

Cassian sighs, admits that with a slight nod. One of her hands comes back to his face, brushing through his hair, reminding him that she’s still here, like she can’t quite stop herself from reaching out.

He’s warm. He’s so warm.

“It wasn’t…it’s not _really_ true. I just needed to think. I felt lost.” That’s a surprisingly honest thing to say, he thinks. Must be the painkillers. “I don’t know where I’m going to go. Didn’t seem to be a point. But I kept getting up.” As he speaks, he understands it better. Understands what before had just been instinct. A refusal to give up without giving his all. Maybe it’s hindsight and her fingers trailing across his temple and her worried face above him, or maybe it’s the fucking painkillers again, but he says, “I needed to see you.”

She shakes her head, rolls her eyes a little.

“Chirrut isn’t the only one who’s dramatic,” she says, although her voice is clogged with emotion, and he knows why she’s saying it. Trying to pass it off as a joke.

It’s the painkillers that make him smile up at her. Maybe a fuller smile than he’s had in years.

(Jyn thinks it’s the most beautiful thing she’s ever seen, and her throat closes up more with the need to cry for both of them).

Cassian finally says, “he tried to tell me so many times that you hadn’t left on your own. I was just…I couldn’t hear it.”

“I know,” she says. “He told me. I’m so…” a tear, slipping free from the corner of her eye, seems to surprise both of them, and she wipes it away hurriedly, angrily. “I’m sorry about what I said. When you didn’t respond to my messages, I thought…I thought you must have hated me for it.”

“No,” Cassian breathes out, pained. “I waited. When I didn’t hear from you, I thought you were just being _kind_ with that note on the datapad.”

She laughs, and it sounds as tangled up as he feels. It has the bitter taste of Draven between them.

“Nothing I said was true, Cassian. Nothing could be farther from it. I…” She bites off her words, physically, clamping down on her lower lip again. She shakes her head. Raises her eyes to the ceiling briefly, blinking away any more rogue tears. “Cassian, you have to know. If you’re going to leave, we’re going with you.”

“We?”

“We talked about it. Not much to say, actually, when it came down to it. Not much argument from anyone. Bodhi thought it was _absurd_ that you thought we’d go anywhere without you. K nearly short-circuited.”

“Jyn…”

“Chirrut said he already talked to you about this. That we belong together, and he’s right.”

“You belong _here_ , helping. You belong in the Rebellion. Leia was right. I’m just…I’m holding you back.”

“Now you’re being ridiculous.”

“I’m not.”

“Of course you are. This isn’t the Rebellion, Cassian. Look around you. I called them in because I needed them, but this was the right person making the right argument at the right time. That’s all it was. You don’t need to be the Rebellion to help people, and that’s what we’ll do. We have contacts enough, don’t we? Between the two of us? And there are always going to be too many people for the Rebellion to help. So why don’t we help them? Just us, the six of us. Rogues again.”

Cassian reaches for her hand, still pressed against his temple. She lets him take it, lets him bring it to his lips, lets him press a kiss to her fingertips. She looks like she’s afraid of what he’s going to say, but…

_She deserves the chance to make her own choice._

“I only want you to…” he sighs, hating the way this sounds, hating that he can’t think of something more profound to say. “I only want you to be happy, Jyn. Whatever you want. Whatever you choose. What do _you_ want?”

As if it’s the most ridiculous question she’s heard in her life, Jyn laughs. A short, bitter bark of a sound that clashes with the smile that spreads across her face.

“You karking idiot,” she says, incongruously fond, and she leans closer to him, balanced on her elbows, arms folded in front of her, eyes still sparkling with unshed tears. “Cassian, I want _you_.”

And, oh, so maybe it’s obvious. Maybe he knew, somewhere inside him where he hasn’t managed to silence every hope, that she wouldn’t choose to leave him. But he never thought he would deserve this moment. He’s still sure that he doesn’t.

But he moves up to meet her, half sitting up, his hand cradling the back of her head when she kisses him, both of them murmuring breathy, gasped-out promises of _always_ and _never_ and _hope_ , and his chest stutters with something that might be half a sob. She kneels there on the floor beside his bed, her arms wrapping around him tight. Crushing, painful, perfect.

 _Welcome home_ , he’d said to her, on Yavin. And he’s feeling whispers of it, shivering across his skin, the closer he pulls her to him. Home. _Home_.

“Thank you,” he says, and it’s for everything. It’s for coming back, it’s for staying with him, it’s for giving him something more than the next mission. It’s for love. It’s a placeholder for the word that’s too big and too undefined to say to her now.

“Always,” she tells him, and the word burns into his heart, his skin superheated under the touch of her palm, sliding up along his collarbone, over his shoulder, trailing through his hair the way it did in the elevator on Scarif.

There are half-jokes he could tell to dispel the moment. He could make her laugh, or she could break the silence. Find a reason to disentangle herself from him. But the longer the moment stretches, the more it feels like an endless, eternal thing.

Scarif. It always comes back to Scarif. Staring at each other in that elevator. It could have ended there, but it didn’t.

“We should have done this so much sooner,” Jyn whispers, and finally the moment has passed, has released them from themselves, from the expectation and the overwhelming _rightness_ of this moment. He can breathe easily. He kisses her again.

“We have time now,” he promises.

It stretches out in front of him, the possibility. They can go anywhere. They can be anyone. And they’ll be together. _Together._

“Draven’s still at the compound. If you feel up to it…we could go now before he realizes he’s lost us.”

Cassian laughs a little, plays with the edge of the bandage that’s wrapped around her arm, tugging it up a bit from where it had fallen.

“What about your job here?” he asks.

“I said my goodbyes already. After the battle. Kazadu is officially part of the Rebellion now. It was always going to be temporary.”

“Shame. You make a good General.”

“A better pirate.”

“Oh, is that what we are now?”

“Stealing a Rebellion ship. A rebel officer. What else would you call me?”

“Going to command my crew?”

“You can keep the command. I just want the ship.”

“Some pirate.”

“I’m learning.”

Cassian smiles again. Cassian is _happy_.

It cannot possibly be overstated. He doesn’t know how to give it the emphasis it deserves. It’s been so long since he felt like this. Buoyant. Light. Without tethers dragging him back to remind him that this is fleeting, that any happiness is temporary. 

“Let’s go home,” he says, and there’s a note of pleading, a note of desperation for this moment to _last_. Jyn nods, her smile wide. She helps him sit up. Helps him get to his feet. Helps him put his shirt over his head, his jacket on. He’s unsteady, and his ribs hurt, but it could be worse. He can walk, and his head is clearer than it’s been in years. He looks over at her, finds her watching him, waiting for him. She’s got her small pack slung over one shoulder, his coat tucked under her arm. She’s looking at him like he’s so much more than he is, and for once that doesn’t eat away at him like something damning. He feels no desire to turn away and tell her _that’s not me. How you’re looking at me. I can’t be that person. I can’t give you anything_.

“After you, Captain,” Jyn says, a teasing edge back in her voice.

 _She deserves the chance to make her own choice_. And she has. And she has chosen _him._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, thank you so much for reading and commenting. I am blown away by everyone who keeps coming back to share their thoughts, and I really love you all.
> 
> I think I'm probably going to do something like I did after the last mission: take a bit of a break, decompress, do as much writing as I can. I actually deleted the 5,000 words I had written for the next mission (because, this cannot be stated enough, my first draft was an entirely different beast. They had not even kissed a single time yet in it), so this is the first time I'm going into a mission entirely blind. It may take a little while for me to write it and catch up, and I'm going to have a SUPER busy couple of weeks, so I don't want to leave anything hanging. 
> 
> I hope you all enjoyed this chapter of mostly fluff after a long mission (series?) of mostly angst!


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